Research and such

Sooner or later a teacher must have a doctorate. To say that one needs to create knowledge to be in the teaching profession is an ideal. How can one create knowledge? This is a bit like the journalist creating news.

Can knowledge be created? I can understand insights that one gets as a flash. Mostly they are in the nature of combination of existing information that presents in a moment of relaxed state.

Whenever I heard about research I had in mind an invention like a physical contraption that can be of some use. This was usually after the workshop kind of tinkering that produced something.

Can something be produced in the social sciences? An invention that is worth mentioning as pragmatic? Instead, in social sciences, one tends to manipulate concepts and symbols. More often, there is the kind of research that tries to establish a link between two variables. Such as commitment and job satisaction. This seems to be ridiculous. How can we say for sure that commitment can lead to satisfaction or say whether job satisfaction leads to performance or vice versa.

To me this sounds like the polemic on how many teeth are there in the mouth of a horse? The obvious answer is why should we care! Even if one wants to know, the possible way is to have a discussion on it which would be a highly intellectualised one. The third and most obvious method is to fell one and count the teeth for sure which would the empirical method.

There is also the problem of measuring and quantification. I am of the opinion that what cannot be quantified need not be forcefully quantified. In the social sciences the problem of some phenomena changing just because something is being studied also poses the additional problem of the uselessness of research.

Then there is the problem that no real original research happens in this part of the world. There is only a replication or an imitation of what the white man has already done.

The quesiton of a finding being open to falsification is yet another problem. I believe the white man's predicament is in the main due to the emphasis on analysis whereas there are things that need to be known intuitively as a whole.

Much of the problems of the world such as the wars and such have proceeded from an ideaology that looked phenomena from a single perspective and acted upon too soon only later to find there were certain things left out. No need to mention that the white man has succeeded in the material sense, in the making of gadgets, in the making of vehicles in the making of materials, but has not found happiness.




Nevertheless one needs a doctorate because that is the prevailing wisdom. One has to find a university that offers one, find a guide and then get his concurrence and simultaneously find a topic. Often it reduces to finding two variables and trying to study the occurence of the two together or the effect of one over the other.

Then there is the problem of tools of data collection. Often a standardised questionnaire. Making a standardised questionnaire itself is a research.
There are more sensible methods of research such as the qualitative studies. However, what surprised me was the notion that one has to stick to the prevailing notion of logical postitivism that studies two variables in relation to each other. The prevailing system decides what needs to be studied. Often it reduces to mere mechanical work devoid of life.