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Research Overview

Chapter 1. Nature of Research

1.1. Why Business Research is Needed

To make a decision on business strategy To analyze market To understand and predict demand To learn about competition To improve marketing and sales efforts To introduce new products and services For many other reasons

1.2. Defining Research

1.2.1. What is Involved in Research

A research involves the following:

What is Involved in Research Activity What Kind Why observation inquiry investigation logical inference experimentation examination simulation objective systemic studious logical critical diligent exhaustive orderly to discover new knowledge to revise accepted principles or conclusions to avoid status quo

1.2.2. What is Research

Thus Research is

A systematic, studious inquiry to discover facts, to find new truths, and to avoid status quo. An orderly, exhaustive investigation to revise accepted principles or conclusions. A diligent, objective examination to find new truths and revise accepted principles or conclusions. Other …

1.2.3. Is There a Better Definition of Research?

One important element in research is that of curiosity!

Research requires of a person an attitude of inquisitiveness:

I wonder how … I wonder why … I wonder what … I wonder where … I wonder …

The researcher seeks to know reasons and causes behind events and behavior.

Research is an activity characterized by intellectual curiosity, using systematic planning to collect facts, performing objective analysis through logical thinking, and ending with a new truth or verification of an existing one.

Any Research starts with a question, an answer to which is unknown or not easily available.

Just collecting facts or data is a step in research rather than a complete research. Research must turn the facts and data into knowledge that includes relationship of new facts and data with the existing facts and data, explanations, and logical conclusions.

1.3. Fundamental and Applied Research

1.3.1. Definition of Fundamental and Applied Research

Research can be characterized by a wide range of goals, purposes, meaning and activities.

Traditionally, research has been classified by the researcher’s goal or purpose for undertaking research – that of fundamental or applied research:

Fundamental research is characterized as having a major goal of a deeper understanding of the universe and the processes in it. Applied research is characterized as having a practical goal which can be reached by application of fundamental or other applied knowledge.

1.3.2. Examples of Fundamental and Applied Research

Fundamental Research Applied Research String Theory in Physics Stem Cells in Biology Anthropology Cosmology New methods in Statistics New methods in Mathematics Cognitive Science Human Psychology Fuzzy Logic Game Theory Probabilities Theory of experiment Planning Business research Application of Mathematics for stress analysis Application human psychology for marketing Risk management by application of probabilities  Questionnaires optimization by application of experiment planning for business. Application of Game Theory for research in business strategy Research in Fuzzy Logic for camera automation.

1.3.3. Link Between Fundamental and Applied Research

By knowledge we understand a collection of results of fundamental and applied research. Most fundamental knowledge over time becomes applied knowledge as more results have been accumulated and practical applications of that knowledge become clear. Some fundamental research have been originated from applied research. Thus there is a close relationship between fundamental and applied research.

Fundamental Research Applied Research Mathematical Statistics Sampling research in marketing Cellular Biology Research in treating HIV Nuclear Physics Optimization of nuclear power plants Research in 3D Imaging and object reconstruction Research in 3D Tomography and MRI Geophysics Research on earthquake prediction

1.4. Continuity of Knowledge and Research

The knowledge that the mankind possesses has been accumulated throughout a long time for thousands of years piece by piece adding up on the top of “pyramid of knowledge.” Every new discovery, every new big and even small research results are adding up a piece of new knowledge on the top of the existing pool of knowledge (“pyramid of knowledge.”). Every research, which we conduct, is based on the previously existing knowledge and represents a continuation of knowledge accumulation process. Thus it is very important to be aware of previously conducted research and accumulated knowledge in the area of your research interests in order to provide continuation of knowledge and to do good and valuable research.

1.5. Research vs Search

1.5.1. Research Starts with a Question

Every research starts with a question and consists of the activities to find the answer.

There is no research without a question.

The research is completed, when the answer is found.

A research questions can be phrased as a question or in the form of a statement and is referred to as a “problem statement.”

An answer to the research question is referred to as a “conclusion.”

In the conclusion all questions posed in the problem statement must be addressed (answered).

Conclusion may answer more questions than asked in the problem statement.

1.5.2. Research Starts with a Question

Both, search and research start with a question and consists of the activities to find the answer.

Search is the activity to find an answer to the question if we believe that the answer is already known and somewhere available

Research is the activity to find an answer to the question if we believe that the answer is not yet known.

Both, search and research are completed, when the answer is found.

1.5.3. Every Research is Preceded by a Search

Research is a more complex activity than a search.

Before getting engaged in research, first try to find an answer to the question in a presumption that the answer has already known, i.e. first conduct search.

Thus every research should first be preceded by a search.

1.6. Credible Research

1.6.1. Determining the Nature of Credible Research

With all the definitions of research available, apparently something more is needed.  The wide ranges in quality evident in completed research projects, theses, and dissertations suggest criteria need to be established for credible research.

Credible research means praiseworthy research. It measures up to today’s accepted standards

When is research really research? Does the typical college term paper qualify as research? Does the market survey qualify as research?  Does simulation or model building qualify as research?

The depth of meaning of the word research varies with the person or group, even though the activity or process completed actually meets the broad definition of research given here.

1.6.2. Characteristics of Credible Research

Thus credible research must have a meaningful problem, be purposeful, employ appropriate procedures, have properly supported conclusions stemming from logical analyses, be presented in proper form, and be based upon the scientific method.

Seven Basic Characteristics of credible research:

A meaningful, limited, clearly defined problem. A needed purpose. An appropriate research design. Proper collection and treatment of the data. Original and non-trivial results. Clear and meaningful conclusions derived from the results. A complete, logical, and orderly report and presentation.

Test Questions and Home Tasks

Please provide written answers to the test questions and home tasks and submit them in the beginning of the next class. Late submission will result in the reduction of grade.

Test Questions for Checking Your Knowledge

What is research? With what does research begins and with what does research ends? Is collection of data research? What is the difference between search and research? What is the difference between fundamental and applied research? What comes first, fundamental or applied research? How do fundamental and applied research are related? How do researchers contribute to the pyramid of knowledge? What is credible research? What are the criteria of credible research? What is the difference between search and research?

In all answers provide definitions, elaborate on the concept and provide examples. Feel free to make up the entire example and all data for your examples.

From <http://elearning.lincolnuca.edu/aityan/ba312/01_nature_of_research.html>

Intellectual Traits

Valuable Intellectual Traits 
Richard Paul and Linda Elder 

Intellectual traits, or virtues, are interrelated intellectual habits that enable students to discipline and improve mental functioning. Teachers need to keep in mind that critical thinking can be used to serve two incompatible end s: self-centeredness or fair-mindedness. As students learn the basic intellectual skills that critical thinking entails, they can begin to use those skills in either a selfish or in a fair-minded way. For example, when students are taught how to recognize mistakes in reasoning (commonly called fallacies), most students readily see those mistakes in the reasoning of others but do not see them so readily in their own reasoning. Often they enjoy pointing out others' errors and develop some proficiency in making their opponents' thinking look bad, but they don't generally use their understanding of fallacies to analyze and assess their own reasoning. It is thus possible for students to develop as thinkers and yet not to develop as fair-minded thinkers. The best thinkers strive to be fair-minded, even when it means they have to give something up. They recognize that the mind is not naturally fair-minded, but selfish. And they understand that to be fair-minded, they must also develop particular traits of mind, traits such as intellectual humility, intellectual courage, intellectual empathy, intellectual integrity, intellectual perseverance, faith in reason, and fair-mindedness. Teachers should model and discuss the following intellectual traits as they help their students become fair-minded, ethical thinkers. 

1. Intellectual Humility: Having a consciousness of the limits of one's knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one's native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively; sensitivity to bias, prejudice and limitations of one's viewpoint. Intellectual humility depends on recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. It does not imply spinelessness or submissiveness. It implies the lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations, of one's beliefs.
   
2. Intellectual Courage: Having a consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing. This courage is connected with the recognition that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions and beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading. To determine for ourselves which is which, we must not passively and uncritically "accept" what we have "learned." Intellectual courage comes into play here, because inevitably we will come to see some truth in some ideas considered dangerous and absurd, and distortion or falsity in some ideas strongly held in our social group. We need courage to be true to our own thinking in such circumstances. The penalties for non-conformity can be severe.
   
3. Intellectual Empathy: Having a consciousness of the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them, which requires the consciousness of our egocentric tendency to identify truth with our immediate perceptions of long-standing thought or belief. This trait correlates with the ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. This trait also correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand.
   
4. Intellectual Integrity: Recognition of the need to be true to one's own thinking; to be consistent in the intellectual standards one applies; to hold one's self to the same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one holds one's antagonists; to practice what one advocates for others; and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one’s own thought and action.
   
5. Intellectual Perseverance: Having a consciousness of the need to use intellectual insights and truths in spite of difficulties, obstacles, and frustrations; firm adherence to rational principles despite the irrational opposition of others; a sense of the need to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve deeper understanding or insight. 
   
6. Faith In Reason: Confidence that, in the long run, one's own higher interests and those of humankind at large will be best served by giving the freest play to reason, by encouraging people to come to their own conclusions by developing their own rational faculties; faith that, with proper encouragement and cultivation, people can learn to think for themselves, to form rational viewpoints, draw reasonable conclusions, think coherently and logically, persuade each other by reason and become reasonable persons, despite the deep-seated obstacles in the native character of the human mind and in society as we know it. 
7. Fair-mindedness: Having a consciousness of the need to treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one's own feelings or vested interests, or the feelings or vested interests of one's friends, community or nation; implies adherence to intellectual standards without reference to one's own advantage or the advantage of one's group.

Critical Thinking Principles Draft Statement

A Draft Statement of Principles 
Dr. Richard Paul, Chair, NCECT 

Goals 
The goals of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction are as follows:

1. To articulate, preserve, and foster high standards of research, scholarship, and instruction in critical thinking.
2. To articulate the standards upon which "quality" thinking is based and the criteria by means of which thinking, and instruction for thinking, can be appropriately cultivated and assessed.
3. To assess programs which claim to foster higher-order critical thinking.
4. To disseminate information that aids educators and others in identifying quality critical thinking programs and approaches which ground the reform and restructuring of education on a systematic cultivation of disciplined universal and domain specific intellectual standards. 

Founding Principles 

1. There is an intimate interrelation between knowledge and thinking.
2. Knowing that something is so is not simply a matter of believing that it is so, it also entails being justified in that belief (Definition: Knowledge is justified true belief).
3. There are general, as well as domain-specific, standards for the assessment of thinking.
4. To achieve knowledge in any domain, it is essential to think critically.
5. Critical thinking is based on articulable intellectual standards and hence is intrinsically subject to assessment by those standards.
6. Criteria for the assessment of thinking in all domains are based on such general standards as: clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, significance, fairness, logic, depth, and breadth, evidentiary support, probability, predictive or explanatory power. These standards, and others, are embedded not only in the history of the intellectual and scientific communities, but also in the self-assessing behavior of reasonable persons in everyday life. It is possible to teach all subjects in such a way as to encourage the use of these intellectual standards in both professional and personal life.
7. Instruction in critical thinking should increasingly enable students to assess both their own thought and action and that of others by reference, ultimately, to standards such as those above. It should lead progressively, in other words, to a disciplining of the mind and to a self-chosen commitment to a life of intellectual and moral integrity.
8. Instruction in all subject domains should result in the progressive disciplining of the mind with respect to the capacity and disposition to think critically within that domain. Hence, instruction in science should lead to disciplined scientific thinking; instruction in mathematics should lead to disciplined mathematical thinking; instruction in history should lead to disciplined historical thinking; and in a parallel manner in every discipline and domain of learning.
9. Disciplined thinking with respect to any subject involves the capacity on the part of the thinker to recognize, analyze, and assess the basic elements of thought: the purpose or goal of the thinking; the problem or question at issue; the frame of reference or points of view involved; assumptions made; central concepts and ideas at work; principles or theories used; evidence, data, or reasons advanced, claims made and conclusions drawn; inferences, reasoning, and lines of formulated thought; and implications and consequences involved.
10. Critical reading, writing, speaking, and listening are academically essential modes of learning. To be developed generally they must be systematically cultivated in a variety of subject domains as well as with respect to interdisciplinary issues. Each are modes of thinking which are successful to the extent that they are disciplined and guided by critical thought and reflection.
11. The earlier that children develop sensitivity to the standards of sound thought and reasoning, the more likely they will develop desirable intellectual habits and become open-minded persons responsive to reasonable persuasion.
12. Education - in contrast to training, socialization, and indoctrination - implies a process conducive to critical thought and judgment. It is intrinsically committed to the cultivation of reasonability and rationality. 

History and Philosophy  Critical thinking is integral to education and rationality and, as an idea, is traceable, ultimately, to the teaching practices — and the educational ideal implicit in them — of Socrates of ancient Greece. It has played a seminal role in the emergence of academic disciplines, as well as in the work of discovery of those who created them. Knowledge, in other words, has been discovered and verified by the distinguished critical thinkers of intellectual, scientific, and technological history. For the majority of the idea's history, however, critical thinking has been "buried," a conception in practice without an explicit name. Most recently, however, it has undergone something of an awakening, a coming-out, a first major social expression, signaling perhaps a turning-point in its history.

This awakening is correlated with a growing awareness that if education is to produce critical thinkers en mass, if it is to globally cultivate nations of skilled thinkers and innovators rather than a scattering of thinkers amid an army of intellectually unskilled, undisciplined, and uncreative followers, then a renaissance and re-emergence of the idea of critical thinking as integral to knowledge and understanding is necessary. Such a reawakening and recognition began first in the USA in the later 30's and then surfaced in various forms in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, reaching its most public expression in the 80's and 90's. Nevertheless, despite the scholarship surrounding the idea, despite the scattered efforts to embody it in educational practice, the educational and social acceptance of the idea is still in its infancy, still largely misunderstood, still existing more in stereotype than in substance, more in image than in reality.

The members of the Council (some 8000 plus educators) are committed to high standards of excellence in critical thinking instruction across the curriculum at all levels of education. They are, therefore, concerned with the proliferation of poorly conceived "thinking skills" programs with their simplistic — often slick — approaches to both thinking and instruction. If the current emphasis on critical thinking is genuinely to take root, if it is to avoid the traditional fate of passing educational fad and "buzz word," it is essential that the deep obstacles to its embodiment in quality education be recognized for what they are, reasonable strategies to combat them formulated by leading scholars in the field, and successful communication of both obstacles and strategies to the educational and broader community achieved.

To this end, sound standards of the field of critical thinking research must be made accessible by clear articulation and the means set up for the large-scale dissemination of that articulation. The nature and challenge of critical thinking as an educational ideal must not be allowed to sink into the murky background of educational reform and restructuring efforts, while superficial ideas take its place. Critical thinking must assume its proper place at the hub of educational reform and restructuring. Critical thinking — and intellectual and social development generally — are not well-served when educational discussion is inundated with superficial conceptions of critical thinking and slick merchandizing of "thinking skills" programs while substantial — and necessarily more challenging conceptions and programs — are thrust aside, obscured, or ignored. 


Elements of Thought 
Linda Elder and Richard Paul 

If teachers want their students to think well, they must help students understand at least the rudiments of thought, the most basic structures out of which all thinking is made. In other words, students must learn how to take thinking apart. All thinking is defined by the eight elements that make it up. Eight basic structures are present in all thinking. Whenever we think, we think for a purpose within a point of view based on assumptions leading to implications and consequences. We use concepts, ideas, and theories to interpret data, facts, and experiences in order to answer questions, solve problems, and resolve issues. Thinking, then, generates purposes, raises questions, uses information, utilizes concepts, makes inferences, makes assumptions, generates implications, and embodies a point of view. Students should understand that each of these structures has implications for the others. If they change their purpose or agenda, they change their questions and problems. If they change their questions and problems, they are forced to seek new information and data, and so on. Students should regularly use the following checklist for reasoning to improve their thinking in any discipline or subject area: 

1. All reasoning has a purpose. 
   1. State your purpose clearly. 
   2. Distinguish your purpose from related purposes. 
   3. Check periodically to be sure you are still on target. 
   4. Choose significant and realistic purposes.
2. All reasoning is an attempt to figure something out, to settle some question, solve some problem. 
   1. State the question at issue clearly and precisely. 
   2. Express the question in several ways to clarify its meaning and scope. 
   3. Break the question into sub-questions. 
   4. Distinguish questions that have definitive answers from those that are a matter of opinion and from those that require consideration of multiple viewpoints.
3. All reasoning is based on assumptions (beliefs you take for granted). 
   1. Clearly identify your assumptions and determine whether they are justifiable. 
   2. Consider how your assumptions are shaping your point of view.
4. All reasoning is done from some point of view. 
   1. Identify your point of view. 
   2. Seek other points of view and identify their strengths and weaknesses. 
   3. Strive to be fair-minded in evaluating all points of view.
5. All reasoning is based on data, information, and evidence. 
   1. Restrict your claims to those supported by the data you have. 
   2. Search for information that opposes your position, as well as information that supports it. 
   3. Make sure that all information used is clear, accurate, and relevant to the question at issue. 
   4. Make sure you have gathered sufficient information.

Interrogative Method Diagrams

Interrogative Method

When - Where	Who - What	How - Why
Condition - Context	Interaction	Evaluation
*	*	*
Space - Time	Role - Agent	Criteria for Evaluation

When - Where:

What is the condition or context (spatial and/or chronological)? How is X situated?

Who - What:

Who acts? Who is acted upon (Agent/Client)? What is the relationship/interaction pattern between X and Y?

How - Why:

How is X to be evaluated (Criteria 1, 2, 3 pro/con)?

Why is X in its current situation or condition (evaluation of cause/effect relationships)?

Cognitive Layers

Cognitive Layers

Fact
Concept
Process
Procedure
Principle

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