What counts for knowledge?

Part Three of this book explores the ‘research methodology’ that has shaped both the research and the writing of this book. Before we dive into that, though, we’ll take a moment to define our terms. Lest the idea of research should sound intimidating, remember that we all do research every day. Shoppers compare prices, for example, students investigate courses, new parents watch others care for babies, teens try new games, and jobseekers weigh professional options.

At its most basic, research is a purposeful and systematic investigation that seeks to build new knowledge. The term methodology is a little trickier, but it can be thought of as the philosophies that researchers bring to their research methods, the tools that researchers use to do their work. These can include interviews, experiments, observations, surveys and much more.

In addition to these commonplace definitions, there are also a number of implicit – and often unspoken – ideas about what research is and how it should operate. Academically situated researchers undergo long training and socialisation processes that involve learning the forms, practices, traditions, theories and languages of their disciplines. As they move through those processes, they gain an expertise presumed to uniquely qualify them as researchers in that discipline. When these experts then produce knowledge, that knowledge is often endowed with a special authority; indeed, it is usually regarded as wholly different from the knowledge that those without academic credentials produce. Other researchers are more likely to draw, repeat or expand upon academically produced knowledge, and policy makers are more likely to put it to work. Moreover, because much academic knowledge is highly specialised, with its own technical terms or jargon, those who are not trained in academic language can have difficulty in reading and understanding that knowledge.

How do we make historical knowledge?

Before the mid- to late 20th century, it was not common for the people and communities being researched to have a say in how that research was conceptualised and carried out (Hymes, 1972; Asad, 1973), although many individual professional, academic or community-based researchers sought to work on more egalitarian terms with research participants (see, for example, Darnell, 2001; Lassiter, 2005; Oakley, 2017). In any case, until the 1970s and 1980s, it was more common for academic researchers to design and control research (Clifford, 1983).