Introduction

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.”
                                                                                        — Zora Neale Hurston

I’m going to use this “book” as a way to present written material for our class (EOD 920: Research 1: Introduction to Research Methods).

I’ve been teaching undergraduate research methods for a long, long time and I’m excited to be teaching Ed.D students. I have also been thinking a lot about how to organize the class, the level at which to teach it, the expectations of what students know coming in, and how this course fits into the series of three research courses in the program’s curriculum. And, of course, I’m thinking about how to ensure that students who complete the class are prepared to start work on their dissertation research.

The most important outcome of this class is that you find doing research interesting and feel confident in your abilities to move forward with a research project.

My sociology undergraduate course has evolved over the years, but historically it was what I consider a classic, textbook based research methods course that has a pedagogy highly focused on active learning and covers a range of topics.

I think we will need to focus on a lot of that text book content because probably most students have not had that course before.  If nothing else, you need the “text book as reference” to make sure you are comfortable and accurate with important vocabulary and concepts. There are many kinds of methods textbooks, and I think as doctoral students you need to use one at the more challenging end of the scale. You also need to cover material that is a bit wider than most textbooks because there are many disciplinary approaches that make sense in organizational leadership and related areas.

At the same time, I think you need more than a textbook. You need to read both articles (and chapters and books) about methods and methodological topics and examples of different kinds of research. So there will also be that kind of reading each week. We will also be doing some small research projects. Some will be quick and are designed to get you thinking about what we are discussing. It will be a lot but I hope it is exciting too.

Finally, this is not a statistics course, but you don’t have a statistics course and you really need one, if only so you can read with understanding and understand the logic of sampling. So there are some moments where we will be learning and doing statistics, sometimes with R and sometimes with Excel. And to achieve this we will integrate statistical analysis throughout.

EW