Research

A research is an organized inquiry aimed at producing knowledge. The term names both the activity and its products: a particular research is a study or investigation; research as a practice is the body of activity from which sciences and scholarly disciplines are constituted. What separates a research finding from a guess is not the subject matter but the methodology that governs how the claim was formed, what counts as evidence for it, and how it is made answerable to other inquirers.

¶Method as the differentia

A claim becomes a research finding when it has been formed under a discipline that constrains how evidence is gathered, how alternative explanations are ruled out, and how results are made available to be checked. The specific discipline varies by tradition — controlled experimentation in the natural sciences, archival reconstruction in history, ethnographic immersion in anthropology, formal proof in mathematics, participant-validation in community-based work — but each tradition has a recognized standard for distinguishing a finding from a guess. Without such a standard, an inquiry produces opinion, however informed; with one, it produces a finding that other inquirers can confirm, extend, or refute.

¶Three traditions

Scientific research in the post-Galilean tradition centers hypothesis formation, controlled observation, and theory revision. Karl Popper (1959) sharpened this into the falsifiability criterion: a hypothesis is scientific if some possible observation could disconfirm it. The criterion is methodologically loose in practice — Thomas Kuhn (1962) showed that working scientists more typically operate within a paradigm, a shared exemplar of how problems are solved, and only revise the paradigm under sustained anomaly — but the orientation persists: scientific research stakes its claims on what would, if observed, refute them.

Interpretive research in the hermeneutic tradition centers reading, contextualization, and the reconstruction of meaning. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975) frames it as a dialogue between text and interpreter: the researcher’s prior horizon shapes what they see, and the encounter with the source revises that horizon. Method here is the discipline of holding interpretation accountable to what the source can sustain — to its language, its context, its silences — rather than to what the interpreter would prefer it to mean.

Participatory and action research centers co-inquiry: the community studied is also a co-author of the research design and its findings. Kurt Lewin’s 1946 essay establishes the foundational form (researchers and community jointly diagnose, plan, act, evaluate, and revise), and Paulo Freire (1970) gives it a political grounding (knowledge produced about a community without that community’s participation reproduces the structure that excludes them). Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) extends this critique to indigenous methodologies: research that takes communities as objects rather than co-inquirers is methodologically suspect on its own terms, because it cannot honor the relational accountability that gives the findings standing within the community studied.

These three are not exhaustive — clinical research, design research, archival research, formal proof, and many indigenous research methodologies each have their own disciplines — but they suffice to establish that research is plural in method, unified in stance.

¶Research programmes

Imre Lakatos (1970) frames research at a longer scale than the individual study. A research programme is a sustained line of inquiry organized around a hard core of constitutive commitments, a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses that absorb empirical pressure, and a positive heuristic that generates new problems from within the programme’s own structure. A programme is progressive when its modifications produce new predictions that succeed independently of the anomalies that prompted them; it is degenerating when modifications only protect the core against refutation. This reframes evaluation: the unit is not “does this experiment confirm or falsify a hypothesis?” but “is this programme producing new knowledge, or only defending old?”

¶Distinction from adjacent practices

Research differs from speculation in the obligation to subject claims to disconfirmation under the relevant tradition’s discipline. Speculation may be insightful or generative, but its claims are not staked: nothing the inquirer would otherwise observe could refute them.

Research differs from debate in the obligation to be persuadable by evidence. Debate is structured around persuading an audience; research is structured around being correctable by what the world or the source supplies. The two practices have overlapping techniques (argument, citation, marshaling of cases) but different stances: a debater who concedes loses; a researcher who concedes finds.

Research differs from reportage in the obligation to produce knowledge that did not previously exist. Careful and accurate reportage may be a precondition for research, and may itself rest on substantial inquiry, but it does not, on its own, constitute research unless it generates findings not already established.

¶See Also

• inquiry — the work-type research is a kind of
• methodology — the discipline that distinguishes research
• evidence — what research’s claims are accountable to
• hypothesis — the staked claim of a research programme
• theory — one of research’s products
• knowledge — research’s aim