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When you have a practical problem on which you want information, it is not always necessary to do it the hard way, that is, to gather data empirically. It may well be that someone has already encountered a similar problem and perhaps has found an effective solution to it. Often this intelligence has remained as tacit knowledge of the trade or profession and is not easily accessible for you; but if it has been documented in a book or in an article, you may find the document by means of a reference search. In the best case a study of literature can reveal that you do not need to proceed to empirical work, and in any case, study of literature is normally much cheaper and faster than empirical research. Therefore most research projects start with a study of literature; after it you will be better equipped to judge whether empirical work is indispensable or not.
Even when you cannot find the complete solution to your problem in earlier documents, these often contain useful data related to your problem, like the following:
Textual sources that may be of use to the researcher include:
Normally literature study is done quite early in the research project, immediately after defining the problem to be studied. There can, however, be exceptional situations when other strategies might be motivated:
Where to search references?
In a bibliographical study you will often want to locate reports of earlier studies of a comparable issue, i.e. those which have both
Typical keywords in such a search of literature are on the one hand the type of artifact to be studied ("kitchen appliances", for example) and on the other hand the point of view that you are taking (e.g. "beauty" or "usability").
If no reports turn out which would have both comparable object and similar view, or if there are too few of them, you can widen your search into reports with either the same object or the same point of view with your own project. This will probably return a multitude of references and it will become necessary to sort them out, perhaps into a table like below where the references (marked with the letters x, y and z) are classified into boxes.
| Type of artifact |
Approach of study: | ||||||
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| Portable phones | - | - | - | - | - | - | xx |
| CD players | - | - | - | - | - | - | x |
| Wrist watches | - | - | - | - | - | - | xxx |
| Your product | y | yy | y | y | yy | y | z |
When searching a data-base that contains millions of references, it often happens that you get too many references. In such a case you have to limit the search. Possible delimiters are, e.g.,
Once you are satisfied with the search, it is advisable to save the results on paper or on a diskette, to later examine them in detail.
It would often be interesting to know if there happens
to be a research project going on somewhere which are
investigating a particular question now but which has not published
anything yet. Such projects in progress are sometimes mentioned in conference
reports; you could ask the librarian for the latest ones. Some research institutes publish lists of current
projects, too, perhaps in the WWW.
Another method is to canvass the researchers that you
happen to
know, or to place a note in a suitable news group in the
WWW, asking
for contact to other researchers sharing the same interests.
Public statistics are annual or monthly reports from public or commercial organizations. They contain mainly figures on production, expenditure, staff etc. When printed as books, they may be found in libraries. Otherwise, the researcher has to ask for them directly in the respective institutions, which method has also the advantage of producing the most up-to-date figures.
International statistics are published by e.g.
The principal source of Finnish statistics is the governmental office Statistics Finland.
Private businesses also often produce statistics on management issues as e.g. the amounts of production and expenses in the various departments; these statistics are normally kept highly confidential, as the rival companies could benefit too much from the productivity reports. However, if you are making an internal study for the company, you will perhaps be allowed to read these reports.
In the libraries you can find many books on history, but if you are studying specific topics not covered in books, you will have to search your main documentary source material in the archives, either private, business or governmental. "Historical" does not mean studying antiquity; even things that happened an hour ago are history. For the study of such recent events, you have also other methods at your disposal, like e.g. interviewing the eye witnesses, but documents have the advantage that they do not change with the times. Similarly, the researcher's interventions will not change the documents unlike what may happen to personal reminiscences during the process of interview.
Documents are especially fruitful source material in case you are studying the operations of an organization that has regular archives. Similarly, when you are interested in the life of an artist or other singular person you can sometimes find bundles of letters, diaries, receipts, invoices etc. which have at least some relevance to the person you are studying (though not necessarily to the question you would wish to study). The private papers of famous artists and other distinguished persons are often posthumously salvaged to public archives, e.g. in Finland to the Finnish National Archives, where researchers can study them.
Finding the interesting documents can become problematic if there is no single person or organization where you could focus your search. General penmanship sometimes workable as source material include newspapers and periodicals. Especially their art critiques, editorials, and letters to the editor are often used as source material, or as the object of study. Other possible sources could be advertisements and exhibition catalogues. When Ronald Barthes studied the semiotics of clothing in The Fashion System, (1983) his only source material were two fashions periodicals during two years. Earlier printing houses often saved specimens of their production, but today these archives always run the risk of being destroyed. However, a growing number of museums are today specializing in various branches of industrial production and have been able to rescue many archives of discontinued business enterprises.
The report from the bibliographical search you receive always indicates at least one library where the book can be found. If the library happens to be foreign, no problem -- for a small fee, most libraries will dispatch the book by mail, or send paper copies of those pages you need per fax. This will be unnecessary, if a copy of the book exists in a local library, so a new bibliographical search in the local library may be expedient. In some countries, all the scientific and university libraries have a common catalogue. Before you order books from abroad, you should examine this catalogue. The search is simple when you now know the names of the author and the book.
Once in the library, the researcher will know where the books he is looking for are placed by looking at their signums. The signum indicates the shelf on which the works can be found. On the shelves, the books are in an alphabetical order according to the main word. The main word is the last name of the author or the first word (not a definite or indefinite article, though) of a periodical. If the publication has no author or if it has more than three, the main word is usually the title of the publication. In the computerized file or cards of the library, the main word has been singled out, underlined or written in block letters.
One should take down the signum of the book and the main word as soon as they appear on the screen. They will always be needed, whether the researcher goes to find the book on the shelf himself or asks the librarian to get it for him (in case the book in closed storage).
In the WWW there are now complete English texts of many often cited books. A list of them can be found at the On-line Books Page. Some books also exist on CD-ROM disks.
If your documents include old hand-
written
texts, there is the problem of archaic letter styles. In
libraries, you will find
guide-books with samples of text from various countries
and epochs. An
example is in the illustration on the right showing German
hand-written letters from 19 C (from Vanhat käsialat, a guide published by the Finnish National Archives). Often the best method is to consult an expert in historical studies.
Written sources are usually solicited for two different types of information:
Factual assertions are another thing. They can be either true or untrue or anything between. The researcher can now use only true information, and to eliminate untrue assertions which the original author has tried to present as true, the researcher can use the methods of source criticism.
In principle, the researcher should accept no written assertions unconditionally and without criticism. However, it would usually take too much time to check all the information in every source that the researcher is using, so the usual practice is to accept without new validation all that has been published in a scientific publication series. The same applies to texts in encyclopaedias and handbooks written by generally respected authors.
However, the researcher will probably want to use
printed texts from many sources, with various degrees of credibility. These
may, for example, include news in ordinary newspapers. Most
of them are probably true, but certainly not all; so they evidently
need verification.
Those texts that the researcher usually scrutinizes
with greatest
suspicion are private documents, especially
autobiographies and
other narratives that the individual has constructed after
the event that
they describe. Among documents, printed or hand-written,
there is quite a
continuum in credibility; and the researcher needs a
selection of tools to
check and criticize these documents.
The most efficient method of removing false information is cross-checking, obtaining information from parallel sources. In some cases, the sources will all be documentary. In others, you may try to find eye witnesses and interview these, or perhaps you may visit the site of the original object or action and record whatever can be found there.
Source criticism becomes difficult if there is no parallel information available and your only source is a single document. If that is the case, you should try to find answers to such questions as are presented by Chapin (1920) p. 37:
Error analysis can be used in textual criticism. It deals with spelling mistakes, additions, abbreviations or other details that recur in some of the texts but not in all of them. Some of these differences appear to be sheer mistakes made by the copier. Some have perhaps been caused by negligence, inadequate light, poor vision or the copier not mastering Latin or Greek. Some parts have been deliberately omitted as "useless" by somebody whereas another erudite copier has added something "missing" in the text or even changed the text to make it more appropriate or up-to- date. (Possible motives for changes were thought of earlier, under the heading Source criticism.)
If two texts contain the same peculiarity which is missing in the other texts, that reveals that one of the texts has served as a source for the other; if the timing of the texts can be ascertained elsewhere, it can be assumed that the text which contains fewer grammatical mistakes or which retains words omitted in the other one is the earlier text. (Of course, you should always consider also the possibility that the copier of the later text mastered the grammar better than his predecessor, and corrected the mistakes of the earlier text.)
The first purpose of textual criticism is to
compose a
so-called stem of the manuscripts, see figure on
the right. The
letters A to H refer to the existing manuscripts.
Your problems are not over when you have found and received those books and documents you want to examine. A new problem quite often emerges when you find that the text leaves you in doubt about what the writer exactly wanted to say. If the author is no longer among us and thus cannot explain the obscure places, you can try to gather the missing pieces from several sources. You might, for example, try employing the following points of view, once you have first defined what information it is that you are searching, and when you are sure that you cannot find it directly in the text:
However, sometimes you have to study a text that you know almost nothing about, nor do you know the context from where it originates. The hermeneutic method has been created for these situations.
In the 17C the word "hermeneutics" was applied to
interpreting the
Bible. The word refers to Hermes, who according to ancient
myth had the
task of conveying messages from the other gods to people.
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 - 1911) and others extended the
use of the
hermeneutic technique to all kinds of texts, and today it
is also used to
analyse non textual products of human culture.
First researchers tried to play the part of the original author and simulate his context, history and manner of thinking. The researcher's own values and experiences were to be eliminated, "wiped out". Today we feel instead that such targets are impossible to reach; on the contrary it is better that the researcher consciously recognizes his preferences and also the tradition of earlier research and those interpretations that have been made from the same text. The task of research is thus to translate the text into the language of our contemporary culture. The paradigm of modern hermeneutics is thoroughly explained in Wahrheit und Methode (1960) by Hans-Georg Gadamer.
The goal in hermeneutics is the same as in any humanistic study: to get deeper understanding of the object. The principal method is to inspect the object from alternating perspectives. It can be done even when the origin and context of the text is not known.
At the beginning of your study, you already have some
preliminary
ideas about your object. These notions have perhaps
earlier been
gathered in studies made by you or by others, or at least
they are
conjectures or guesses made by you. Whatever they are,
this "first grasp"
becomes the starting point in your inspection.
During the process, you then alternate the
perspective, or examine
the object from various angles. Each new examination
improves your
understanding of the object. Likewise, when you return to
an angle that
you have already used, you will often be able to find new
insights,
because in the meantime, the other views have improved
your sensitivity
in finding new aspects to the already previously well
known facts and
interpretations.
Alternation of the viewing points is called the
hermeneutic
circle (or the hermeneutic spiral, if you wish
to imply that you
are not repeating your footsteps but getting somewhere,
i.e. deeper, with
the method). You continue with it until shifting to a new
angle no longer
produces any interesting findings.
If no other viewpoints of inspection
are available
(because of lack of information) it is always possible to
alternate two
views: a global view of the object, and a
detailed view
into the components of the object. These two views are
both possible
and fruitful in almost any research project. The idea is
presented in the
diagram on the right.
An often cited example of alternating global and detailed views is reading a poem. During the first reading, some words in the poem seem odd or enigmatic; but once you have read the poem entirely, you will probably be able to discover the special meanings that the words have in this context. And in the next phase, these meanings may inspire you to peruse the complete poem once more, which again may give additional novel insights to you.
Juha Varto (1992, 58) gives the following instructions for hermeneutic interpretation:
Hermeneutics is often used when studying the messages given by poems and novels, but it can also be used to study the themes of paintings and other depictive works of art. With this method, it is easy to proceed from the trivial level of what the work "portrays" to the deeper levels of what the artist perhaps "wants to say". For example, the question of what a certain painting represents can be answered at least on three levels of depth:
A famous example of interpreting a naturalistic picture are the many meanings that Martin Heidegger was able to squeeze out from a painting of van Gogh, depicting a pair of worn-out shoes.
The hermeneutic method is today one of the favorites of
academic
researchers. However, when using it you should always
remember that
you are dealing with your own interpretations, and that
other people may
quite possibly, from the same starting point, end up with
very different
interpretations. It remains thus unclear how valid the
results are in the
outside world.
You should not use hermeneutics if there are other
ways of
extracting the meaning of the original author like
perusing his remaining
papers if an interview is not possible. If these methods
are not feasible,
you should consider improving the plausibility of your
hermeneutic
findings by discussing and evaluating them in cooperation
with other
people. These could be your research colleagues, or better
still those
people that you suppose will utilize your findings.
Likewise, in the case that you have made a series of interviews and from them you have a bunch of obscure and ambiguous narratives, the right method for resolving the ambivalence is not to study the interview notes or tapes with hermeneutic methods. It is better to make renewed interviews and to ask the original informants for clarifications.
If your target is to discover which messages a text, or a work of art, gives into the minds of people generally, the hermeneutic method is not the best one. Instead, you should consider empirical methods like the interview, or perhaps experimentation.
In the study of archives like in other research, you have the choice of extracting either qualitative or quantitative information, or a combination of both. The qualitative methods in the analysis of documents were discussed above, under the titles of source criticism and hermeneutic analysis. The quantitative style, which is often called ex post facto research, will be discussed below.
A quantitative study of causal relations of actions which occurred a long time ago will be possible, if you have suitable quantitative records of the events. You will need an exact hypothesis on the causality, and records of the assumed independent and dependent variables, which were gathered both before and after the assumed causal influence. You then arrange the data so that you can calculate the correlation or other statistical association between the variables. For example, you may have the following (fictitious) data on a company's sales of cars during 1905 and 1906:
| . | 1905 | 1906 |
| Colour of cars | Only black | Black, blue and red |
| Cars sold | 8,000 | 23,000 |
The hypothesis could be that the rise in sales from 1905 to 1906 was caused by the enlarged choice of colours. Such a hypothesis is, indeed, corroborated by the evidence. However, there may also have been other, perhaps stronger, reasons that were never documented; so more research would be needed in this case.
You cannot always be sure of the direction of causality: which is the cause and which is the effect? For example, you may have found statistics which indicate correlation between the time spent watching violent TV programs and the aggressive behaviour of the viewers. However, on the basis of these data only, you cannot know which the right explanation is:
Validity in a new context. Often the source tells us how things are elsewhere (e.g. what kind of cars sell best in another country) but we would wish to apply the data to our own country. When considering if the information is valid in another context, we can use either one of two strategies:
Each quotation or paraphrase must be accompanied by a reference to the source, including the names of the author, and the book. Almost every publication series seems to have different rules on how these are to be presented, so it is best to get the rules from the editor of the series.
In the references, Latin abbreviations are sometimes used, e.g.:
cf. = cfr. = compare (Lat. confer)Once your study of texts is finished you either report it right away, or you continue the study empirically, which means that you will resort to one of the following methods:
ib. = ibid. = same book or place (ibidem)
passim = in several places
op.cit. = the book mentioned above (opero citato)
s.a. = with no indicated printing year (sine anno)
(sic) = thus. You insert this word immediately after the quoted assertion which you think is false.
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November 2, 2004. Original location:
http://www2.uiah.fi/projects/metodi
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