Why Research?

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The pursuit of knowledge can be its own reward. Those who think this way need not read on. To you, the reason to embark on a research project is self-explanatory. The following is meant for those who are interested in an advanced degree, but wonder why an original research project is a required part of the UN studies certificate.

‘See one, do one, teach one.’ In medical school, this is a trusted pattern for learning. Students are supposed to observe, say, an appendectomy, and then to perform one themselves. This is done under the close supervision of experienced physicians and nurses, of course, but nevertheless, the student does one. Even if the budding physician never carries out another appendectomy, having done surgery is part and parcel of becoming a professional physician.

The experience of having performed certain operations is a key experience in any form of training, whether these operations include cutting a body part, fixing a car, or writing an annual report. One of the interesting challenges in my field, political science, is that we tend to teach our students about the most fascinating topics, i.e. revolutions and social change, war and peace, democracy, development, and so on, but we are struggling to turn them into professional political scientists. This is not as bad as it sounds. Political science is a popular discipline in undergraduate and graduate degree programs, and our graduates are doing well in the work place. But compared to our peers in economics, law, or psychology, political scientists tend to have much less of a professional profile. This is unfortunate, and unnecessary.

What do I mean by a professional profile? Employers usually have a clear idea about the required skill set and the characteristics of a designated job. If it is a narrow set of skills, they might limit their search to an economist. If it is a wide set of skills, they will open their search to most of the social sciences. Rarely does an employer, outside of academia, dedicate their search to a political scientist. This results in political scientists entering the career race with many competitors, without any ‘sanctuaries’ where they enjoy competitive advantages.

So how can we give students of political science a professional profile? One way of going about it is to make sure that students go through some of the formative experiences that create such a profile. In our case of political science, these involve roughly three different skill sets. One is topical knowledge. Our students need to know things – that’s why they take classes and write term papers. A second one is administrative or managerial experience. Most of our graduates find careers in areas where they have to deal with bureaucracies, be they of a public or private nature. Some of these skills can be obtained through courses and workshops, but nothing teaches how to deal with colleagues like practical experience. This is why students take internships. Finally, students need to be able to create projects, identify trends, analyze social dynamics, or simply make a difference. In other words, they need to set the agenda. This is where research comes in.

In many ways, a research project is similar to a business proposal or a project design at a non-profit organization. In fact, students should think about their research project as if it were written for the board of the organization they are working for, in order to allow the researcher to build a new project around her findings. To make his case, then, the researcher needs to identify a product, a target audience, a work plan, a (time) budget, and a tool set.

The Research ‘Product’
The researcher’s product is the specific research question she addresses. These can be causal relationships, theoretical puzzles, policy analysis, or attempts to decode the meanings of phenomena. But just as a business needs something to sell, a researcher needs something to say. A mere description of things that recently happened means that the researcher is trying to resell what others have already brought to the market.

The Audience
The researcher’s target audience is not just journal editors and university instructors. A researcher should think about the people who will want to read what she has to say. If there is no one out there interested in what you have to say, find a new research topic! Identifying your audience should go beyond the immediate task at hand. Research leads to findings, and in our discipline, these findings need to be relayed to decision-makers and related to policy changes.

Structure Your Work
Just as a business or an NGO needs to lay out implementation steps, so does the researcher need to plan his work. The researcher’s work plan is a detailed outline, which includes the working hypothesis, the theoretical framework, the needed sources, the methodology, and the expected conclusions. In an organization, the work plan gets discussed again and again by the team assigned to it, and it evolves through the selected inputs of people with different kinds of expertise. A researcher emulates this process by talking to colleagues and peers to get their advice early on in the process.

Budgets, Budgets, Everywhere
Time is money, and graduate students traditionally have neither. This makes realistic planning ever more important. After all, the best research design is useless if it can not be financed. Budgeting for research involves fund raising – from supervisors or from outsiders. And the need to raise funds will never stop, whether to get money for individual research projects or to finance the expansion of an organization. The ability to fundraise for a project is an indicator of its usefulness. It is by no means a perfect indicator. If nobody supports your project, you may well be way ahead of the curve. But you may also be slightly behind, and if that is the case, a project will need to be redesigned.

Tool Cats
Businesses may use machines or, nowadays, specific algorithms, as their tools, while NGOs may use campaigning strategies. Researchers use specific methodologies for their work. Different tasks need different tools, and researchers need to use a specific approach to make their point. If their methodological approach is inconsistent, the product (the research findings) will suffer. The crucial value-added, that tools bring, is precision. Without clearly defined methods, our research remains vague, just as goods manufactured with inferior tools would be shoddy.

All of these steps are required to carry out a research project. For lack of a better expression, there is an entrepreneurial element to doing research. The successful completion of a research project requires the search for a niche, realistic planning, discipline, and, perhaps most of all, passion. A researcher cares. If she doesn’t, the project will fail.

The reward for the student is manifold. Additional to the experience of having carried out original research, the in-depth knowledge gained from a project gives students an identity forming expertise. After all, experts are not born; they are made. The final report also gives students a product: something to hand out. A good research report is invaluable when it comes to proving to employers that you can get a project done, from its first planning stages all the way to completion. Finally, a completed research project gives confidence. A research project is proof to ourselves that we can get a complex and creative task done despite all those pesky constraints.

And that is, in a nutshell, why we do research. It allows students to create a project, to design its shape and carry out its implementation, to determine an agenda and to argue its implications in depth. If done well, it will make a difference.

A research project shows students how political science, or for that matter, all social sciences, work from the inside. Even if a student never again carries out original research, having lived through the experience once puts the work of research into perspective. It shows the ambiguities of theories, the trade-offs between precision and relevance, and the malleability of data. This experience allows the graduate to be a discriminating consumer of research – and the creator of a project. You can not learn this from looking at research reports, and you may never teach anybody about it. But, at least once, you have to ‘do one.’