6 Research Methods and Hypothesis in Resource management

Dr Seema Mehra Parihar

LEARNING OUTCOME

• Understand the need and definition of research in Geography
• Appreciate the different methodology involved in resource management
• Discuss the hypothesis involved in resource management
• Be able to analyse the relevance of hypothesis in researchin resource management

KEY WORDS

Epistemologies, research design, deductive reasoning, hypothesis testing, conventional wisdom

INTRODUCTION

Research is “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications” (Frascati 2002). Research is certainly a requirement that enables and ascertains or corroborate facts, support theorems, reiterate the results of earlier work, solve new or existing problems, and /or evolve new theories. “A research project may also be an expansion on past work in the field. Research projects can be used to develop further knowledge on a topic, or in the example of any research project, they can be used to further a student’s research prowess to prepare them for future jobs or reports. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole” (URL1). There is a difference between primary and applied research. The principal purposes of basic research (as opposed to applied research) revolve around three pronged approach engage, create and measure (figure 1). It broadly includes – “documentation, discovery, interpretation, or the research and development (R&D) of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge Dublin,(2012)”.

Figure 1: Engage –create- measure : three pillars of research

“Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary considerably both within and between humanities and sciences. There are several forms of research: scientific, humanities, artistic, economic, social, business, marketing, practitioner research, life, technological” Sayer(1992)”. Research methods deals with the data in management view as a subjective perspective to make out an objective reality of the resource management. Research methods has to be empirical in the way as to encompass all the spatial variation within a given resource framework. Research methods can be both specific and generalized.

Data forms the basis of any research. “Data are the materials from which academic work is built. As such they are ubiquitous. From passenger counts on transport systems to the constructs used in the most abstract discussion, data always have a place, Dublin (2013).” However, it is important to recognize that like other building materials, they have two universal characteristics. The first is that they are (or at least should be) selected on the basis that they are fit for their intended purpose. Data generation is a purposive activity, and must be governed by the task in hand. This means that data can lead multiple lives, sought after for some purposes and spurned for others. The second point is that they are not unmodified products of nature. Data are not only selected for the purpose; they are shaped for it. Figure 2 illustrates the relevance of data collection work , (Chris Maidden, Cartoon stock.com, search ID:cman738).

Figure 2: RELEVANCE OF DATA COLLECTION SURVEYS

Techniques are tools, and all tools are designed with purposes in mind. If you buy a knife then do nothing more with it than scratch your name on the table-top to demonstrate its sharpness, you have missed the point. In the same way geographers armed with all the skills that a technique can provide will waste their time unless they also know the right (and wrong) way to use it. The purpose that drives the application of techniques in human geography is the desire to undertake the research process. There is no need here for a long discussion of the meaning of the word ‘research’. On the other hand, they often seem happy to leave the term ‘research’ itself undefined, as though we all shared an understanding of its meaning and significance. We can venture a definition of research as the “process of systematically seeking answers to questions that are seen to be important by workers in a field. Posing questions and seeking answers is the bedrock of research, and this foundation is shared by all researchers, no matter what their position in the battle over methodology, Stinchcombe(2005)”. However, there is a conflict, and it is impossible to stay out of it. Even if we do not take entrenched positions we have to recognize that choices have to be made. However, these battle-lines are not permanent.

Fashions in research change, and the students of one generation may be encouraged to scoff at the excesses of zeal displayed by a previous generation in applying outmoded methods and techniques. The same fate awaits all fashions. The current of post-war thought has emphasized paradigms rather than unchallenged verities, interpretation, meaning, and symbolism rather than established facts. As the ground shifts, underfoot it becomes increasingly dangerous to stand in the same place! “The greatest wisdom in research is to be able to tell the difference between methodologies and techniques that are used because they are genuinely appropriate, and those which are used because that is what the research community currently expect, Lindsay (2007).” Awareness of this kind comes largely from experience. The image of conflict is not meant to frighten the reader. The point is that all geography students are researchers from a very early stage and all research has a methodological context. The term ‘researcher’ might seem rather grandiose for people coming to terms with basic practical exercises for the first time, but all exercises are research projects in miniature, and have to be seen in this broader context. Preparing an essay or a seminar paper is a research exercise in its own right. A simple mechanical exercise in the use of a cartographic or statistical technique might offer you only a little window of choice and action in a framework which has been designed in advance. Nevertheless, it carries a methodological loading, even though this may be heavily disguised if the project has not been imaginatively designed. The earlier in your student career you are able to grasp the context in which exercises and projects are offered, the better equipped you will be for individual research. Whatever research you are carrying out, it should not be difficult to identify the problem it is meant to solve, and if you cannot see what the problem is, the research may not be worth doing. Research does not simply happen. All stages in a research project involve thought and decisions. The term ‘research design’ is commonly used to describe this process, but not always in the same way. You will find that some authors use it to cover the whole process of conducting a research project, including the formulation of research questions and the definition of a methodological context (Hakim 1992). Others use it much more narrowly to cover the process of designing the data collection and later phases. The term ‘research design’ will be used for the all-embracing strategic process, and ‘project design’ will be employed to cover the narrower tactical issues of putting the research design into practice.

METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH

Figure 3: Arthur Conan Doyle & Inductive Reasoning

“All research projects try to answer questions. Many research projects tackle questions by framing and testing hypotheses. A hypothesis is at its simplest a proposed answer to a research question, (URL2)” . There will often be a great many possible answers, so the research process will involve creating, testing, and discarding different hypotheses until an acceptable one is found. However, the stage of the research process at which a hypothesis appears, the way it is tested, or indeed the use of a hypothesis at all, all depend on the methodology the researcher is using. A major methodological issue we must look at before going further is the choice between inductive and deductive reasoning. “Both forms of reasoning can be used to test and formulate hypotheses, but in quite distinct ways Inductive reasoning, broadly speaking, works from the particular to the general. Observation of individual cases is used to propose hypotheses that will solve general questions, (ibid)”. Case of Arthur Conan Doyle typically illustrates inductive reasoning. Taking a more mundane geographical example, one might want to find out which mode of transport students used to travel long distances. Working inductively one would survey users of all the main transport forms and use the findings to assess the preferences of all the student users.

     Where one uses inductive reasoning it is inevitable that the hypothesis is not formulated until there is a body of data to work from. Deductive logic works from the general to the particular, and uses general rules or laws to test individual cases. If one uses deductive logic, it will set up a framework in which certain hypotheses are ‘premises’ from which conclusions can be drawn, e.g. in the form ‘If A and B, then C’. Returning to the student travel example, one might develop a structure like this:

•  Coaches offer the cheapest long-distance form of travel (Premise A)

• Students always use the cheapest forms of travel (Premise B)

• Students travelling long distances go by coach (Conclusion C)

If testing of the hypotheses satisfies that the premises are true, the conclusions too can be accepted as logically correct, and these in turn can be used as premises in further deduction. In other words, if one is able to accept the conclusion about student choice of transport, it can be treated as a premise in its own right. In this way deductive reasoning can set up complex chains or hierarchies of logic leading from initial premises to final conclusions. A research hypothesis normally performs a variation on this theme by defining the initial conditions then using evaluation of conclusions to test a hypothesis about the intervening state. It is normal to set out the hypothesis in advance of the process of data generation. A rather more realistic example might clarify the issue. Suppose that one is doing research on the way that availability of transport affected the behavior of shoppers. In a formal deductive structure with known laws one would use initial conditions about the shoppers (mobility, age, household form, for example) and a ‘law’ based on their willingness to travel, and then draw conclusions about their spatial shopping behavior. In the research project, though, one can define initial conditions and measure the ‘conclusions’ in the form of shopping behavior. It is the ‘law’ that we are trying to define and test. The hypothesis might take a form such as: “For a target group of shoppers, independent use of private transport for shopping trips significantly increases the spatial range of shopping. A hypothesis based on a huge mass of inductive evidence might be invalidated if we find just one case that behaves quite differently”. Deductive structures can also be invalidated by instances that break their rules, but methodology has found a way of converting this to a strength. As long ago as the early 1960s Karl Popper developed the doctrine of falsifications, which is based on the belief that no hypothesis can be proved, and that science can advance only by proving successive hypotheses false. From this emerged the grandly named ‘hypothetic-deductive method’, in which hypotheses are tested to see whether or not they can be disproved. In the case of our student travel example, if we find that all our surveyed students travel by coach, we can uphold the hypothesis at least for the time being. If we find one individual travelling by rail or boat, we must discard it and find an alternative. This is not the place for a prolonged discussion of methodology in resource management. That can be found elsewhere. What is important here is to see how the argument about methodology has affected research in the range of fields that comprise resource management. “Broadly speaking research in human geography is shared rather uneasily by two different methodological traditions, one inherited from the scientific tradition in geography and the other acquired from its relationship to the social sciences, Sayer (1992)”.One of the few consistent features has been polarization, with individual geographers tending to align themselves with one or other approach and committing themselves to a methodology that confirmed the correctness of this choice. We work taxonomically by classifying people into groups in some appropriate way. In the shopping example, we try to classify people into groups with different shopping behavior. The relationships we are testing are associations. This is a very important point. We are examining people’s behavior as members of groups and not as individuals, and individual motivation is not being explored (Harré 1979). Typically, we work with relatively large numbers of cases, and statistical tests will often be performed to test the hypothesis. However, even if we can demonstrate very convincingly that a relationship exists, we do not know that difference in access to transport causes difference in shopping behavior. All we know is that for our group the two characteristics are associated at some level of statistical significance. Resource management can be done in the methods which best serves the cause of economical and spatial aspect of political control.

HYPOTHESIS

“Statistics is the science of random processes, the standard alternative theory suggested by the phrase ‘null hypothesis.’ It has the basic form: ‘there is nothing going on here but the generation of random motions in what the investigator thought was a causal space.’ Because there is a great deal of random motion in social life, and because there is a great deal of random noise in social science techniques of observation, every social science finding has to show that it is not likely to be simply noise. Because that alternative theory is one of the few in social science that is well formulated mathematically, it is in general the hardest for ordinary social scientists to learn” (Stinchcombe 2005). “In the most general terms, a ‘hypothesis’ is a testable proposition derived from theory, logic, or existing knowledge; if tested with proper, rigorous methods, the proposition will provide information that adds useful knowledge and contributes to theory. ‘Hypothesis testing’ refers to two distinct approaches in social research. One approach is usually understood in a broad, qualitative sense, while the other is usually described in narrow, quantitative terms, Sayer(2003).” However, what is noted today that even today sustainability is a major issue and new developments since industrial revolutions have not been able to check population growth and innumerable imbalances in the society, including poverty and environmental and man-made disasters.

Figure 3: Two approaches of Hypothetical testing

  First, a hypothesis refers to a rhetorical approach: a technique of persuasion that involves an attempt to gain credibility by establishing common ground with a reader or listener. “The word hypothesis comes from the Greek hypothesis, which in turn came from the Greek hypotithenai, to place under, which came from hypo (‘under’) + tithenai (to put under). To advance a hypothesis is to put forward a postulate, an assumption, or a supposition. In many areas of scholarly research and policy discussion, participants quickly learn that they agree on many aspects of the issue at hand — and indeed, there may be a consensus that is so broad that it approaches what John Kenneth Galbraith famously called the conventional wisdom, John Kenneth Galbraith (URL3) ”

Figure 5: Three Preconditions for proposing a Hypothesis

 Proposing a hypothesis as mentioned in figure 4 require at least three preconditions:

First, the rhetorical hypothesis must be presented in the logic and language of the critic or the opponent with a common ground.

Second, the rhetorical hypothesis must strike a tone of fairness and impartiality.

    Third, the hypothesis must be clearly testable.

SUMMARY

• Research methods and hypothesis are two interrelated and important components of natural resource management.
• Approaches to research in both humanities and sciences, though depend on epistemologies, they are different and vary considerably.
• Major methodological issue we must look at before going further is the choice between inductive and deductive reasoning. Both forms of reasoning can be used to test and formulate hypotheses, but in quite distinct ways Inductive reasoning, broadly speaking, works from the particular to the general.

     Proposing a hypothesis require at least three preconditions, one of the logic and language of the critic or the opponent with a common ground; second of fairness and impartiality and third with the possibility for testing.

References

• Chris Maidden, Cartoon stock.com, search ID: cman738
• Frascati. 2002. Manual: proposed standard practice for surveys on research and experimental development, 6th edition. .
• Hakim, C. 1992. Research Design, Strategies and Choices in the Design of Social research. LONDON: Routledge. .
• Harré, R. 1979. Social Being. oxford.
• Lindsay, J.M. n.d. TECHNIQUES IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY.
• Sayer, A. 1992. Method in Social Science, Routledge: London, 2nd edition.
• Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 2005. The Logic of Social Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,.
• Wyly, Elvin. n.d. Inferences and Hypothesis Testing .