Actually Doing the Research

I really like how Knight's Chapter 7 says that it is okay if things go wrong during the research process. Research isn't always as neat and orderly as the methods books would have us believe. The research that I conducted was messy and emotional and confusing. It did not follow a neat, linear pattern and at times I felt lost along the way. Methods books make research seem so cut and dry. If you're interviewing you follow a set of questions and a procedure. You code a certain way and analyze results a certain way and write your paper a certain way. However, the manuals don't explain how it's going to feel when you're asking a participant really sensitive questions or what to do if they start crying. Even after you get ethics approval there's always a chance that you could emotionally harm a subject. I felt that Knight made the research process seem more real.