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One area where many dissertation students feel ‘stuck’ is undertaking a review of relevant literature. It is not that the students are not clever, or that they lack the skills: it is that they are worried about not getting it right. Fears include missing out a single highly influential source, which would lead to embarrassment and potentially invalidate the entire project, or missing out a body of work in a related discipline. In this chapter, I hope to convey that these fears are rarely well-founded. In academia at large, there is now so much literature that it is not possible for even eminent scholars to engage in detail with all of it; therefore, we certainly would not expect undergraduate or master’s students to achieve this impossible feat. Furthermore, often students will have the opportunity to have their planned literature informally assessed by their supervisor through discussions in supervision and reviewing a draft of the literature review chapter, usually at a relatively early stage. This means that any omissions that need to be addressed can be identified before the work is formally assessed. If you feel unsure or worried about what to include in your literature review, Box 7.1 provides a guide to the purpose of literature review chapters, which you can return to and ask yourself whether you are responding to this requirement. You may choose to use it in line with Resource 7.3 at the end of the chapter.
The time available to develop dissertations and other research projects is almost always less than ideal. Thinking has to be done quickly, and dead ends may be encountered before finding suitable data. For this reason, it may be inconvenient to consider the ethical issues in using data that are available to be collected. However, we really must make time for this, not only because of the importance of ethics themselves but also because your examiners will be assessing your research design and conduct based on this.
Research with pre-existing documents is often seen as ethically uncomplicated. If the documents are in the public domain, it can be argued, they are ‘fair game’ for researchers. Similarly, if documents are in an archive, the fact that the researcher can access them may lead to a sense of security in relation to ethics. However, this is false. We now have robust rules and ethical procedures for undertaking observations in public spaces. This is a far cry from invasive observations of the past, such as Humphreys’ (1970) Tearoom Trade, where the PhD student purposely observed gay sexual encounters in public toilets, at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The unethical acts further included keeping car registration numbers, which could have incriminated the men who were unknowingly under study. These days, that sort of study would not get through ethical review. However, if a similar study looked at, for example, an online community associated with illegal but consensual sexual acts (such as sadomasochistic sex in England and Wales, at the time of writing) and the data they mined contained IP addresses, a similar ethical breach will have occurred.
Throughout the book you will find the suggestion to back up your research and writing; I would hate for you to lose your work. Before you begin searching for the information you need in order to get a high grade, I suggest setting up an electronic folder where you can save all the information.
Box 3.1 provides a potential filing structure for your research project that you may find helpful to use or modify. It is important that the structure makes sense to you, and helps to avoid wasted time searching for things you have already found, or duplicating effort in other ways.
While it is likely most dissertation students will have heard of ethics and ethical review, some of you will be unfamiliar with the terms positionality and reflexivity. I imagine that few readers will feel fully confident to consider their position in the research process and document it for their dissertation. Increasingly, assessments of reflexivity are a standard part of the methods chapter of social science dissertations, and they are sometimes expected in the strengths and limitations section of the discussion chapter.
When I was first introduced to these concepts, I believed that they were much more complicated – and frightening – than they really are. To be reflexive, to be aware of your demographics and the privileges they bring, spend time considering your views and experiences in relation to the topic of your research, and do this throughout the research process. Within this chapter, I will introduce you to tools to help you consider your own positionality. Undertaking research on sensitive topics or becoming more aware of social injustice can be emotionally demanding. For this reason, at the end of the chapter you will find self-care strategies that you can apply to yourself, but also to friends and peers.
Over the past 30 years, there has been increasing recognition that researchers should be reflexive. What this means in practice is that researchers should be aware of, and declare, their epistemology and ontology: that is, the basis on which they draw their understanding of the world. This includes the research paradigm (e.g. interpretivist vs. positivist) that you subscribe to, and any theory that you are using to frame your research.
Towards the beginning of your final year of study, if you are undertaking a dissertation, you will be allocated a supervisor. The allocation of supervisors varies between countries, institutions and even departments within institutions. In some instances, students will be expected to take the initiative and identify potential supervisors themselves. In other institutions, a list of supervisors and topics will be advertised, and students will be asked to choose from this list, not necessarily being allocated their first choice. This process may feel awkward and uncertain, in comparison to the way in which you have been able to select modules throughout your degree. In my experience, it is relatively rare for undergraduate dissertation students to change supervisors part way through the dissertation period, as it is relatively short. What this means in practice is that students have little opportunity to do anything other than make the situation work as best as they can. This is not always easy and may feel uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels unfair. And that absolutely sucks. In dissertations that take place over a longer period, such as master’s and doctoral projects, changing supervisors is more likely to occur if a formal complaint is made.
Students sometimes think that they have done something wrong or are disliked by their supervisor when their supervisor is not supportive. Often, however, it is that the supervisor is overloaded with work, or sometimes they just don’t prioritise students and teaching commitments above research, which is given more prestige by many universities. Knowing it isn’t personal might make things feel easier if you have a difficult working relationship with your supervisor.
We all have ideas about what our research paradigm is, but we don’t always put this into words, and we can be in danger of assuming that what we think is the correct way of doing things is the only way. This is where disciplinary backgrounds, such as sociology, psychology, medicine and geography, are important. In addition to this, you may have heard words that sometimes terrify students (and even experienced researchers), such as epistemology and ontology. These terms refer to how we understand the construction of knowledge and how it is interpreted in research. Those ideas may seem abstract if you haven’t studied any social theory, and you may want to skip ahead to a chapter that feels less painful, but try not to be concerned. This chapter aims to give you enough information to have relevant conversations with your supervisor, if applicable, or to help you discount approaches that you feel don’t suit you, so that the amount you need to read from other sources is smaller.
When we think about research paradigms, what we are really thinking about is the nature of the research approach, which is a combination of ontology and epistemology. In Box 2.1, traditional approaches to research paradigms are described through three layers: ontology, epistemology and research design. If these approaches do not feel suited to you, Helen Kara (2017) provides a more complete, but still highly accessible, exploration of ‘methodologies, approaches and theories’, including ‘transformative methodologies’ (p 46), such as feminist, participatory and decolonising methodologies.
Research questions are important.
I’m going to say that again: research questions are really, really important. You can think of your research question as the ball in any ball-game: without it you have lots of skilled people and a pitch, but no way to play or win the game. Let’s think about this in relation to the chapters of your dissertation (Box 10.1). As always, please do write notes in your research diary as you read through this chapter – those little flashes of inspiration are really important, especially when writing your research question, which needs to be small but mighty.
Box 10.1: Does your research question fit with the content in your dissertation chapters?
Consider your draft research question in relation to its fit with each of your chapters:
- 1. Introduction: why your research question is important.
- 2. Literature review: should point to your research question as almost like an arrow highlighting a group of interesting phenomena being brought together (or a funnel: see Chapter 7 for a refresher) to which the only logical conclusion is your research question.
- 3. Methods: your population, sample (including size) and analysis methods are clearly designed to enable the research question to be answered. The research question should fit the methods exactly.
- 4. Results: describe your findings in a way that explicitly shows your new contribution to knowledge in relation to the research question.
- 5. Discussion: compares the literature in your literature review chapter, which led you to the research question in the first place, and provides a space to identify similarities and differences between your findings and the literature.
- 6. Conclusion: disentangles the importance of the topic area, the methods, research question and new findings to say, with confidence, that your research question and research were important.
There was no discrete ‘built capital’ in Bourdieu’s triad of economy–society–culture. But those base capitals become objectified or embodied in material things or human capacities. Modern economies, for example, require an infrastructure of fixed and mobile objects: places of economic production, means of connectivity and transportation, and other apparatus, to enable that production. Likewise, society is rooted in a material world: places of home, of private and public dwelling, of interaction and the formation of social bonds, which host the development of meaning and shared culture. It was noted in Chapter 1 that later extensions of Bourdieu’s thinking transformed his fundamental capitals into public goods and community resources (Coleman, 1998), tying them to particular places and therefore arriving at the notion of ‘place capitals’. Taking this line of logic further, these capitals became ‘assets’ that advance or restrict the economic, social and cultural lives of different places. How places develop will depend on whether they are asset-rich or asset-poor, whether they have the means to get ahead or are more likely to be left behind. Social capital has become a key signifier of place-based development potential but is often, we would argue, invoked as a shorthand for a constellation of linked capitals, material and non-material. A combination of many things – capacities, skills, knowledge and infrastructures – produces that potential, all of which centre on people, what they do individually and collectively, and what resources they have to hand. Emery and Flora (2006) list only one item under ‘built capital’ in their own expansion of Bourdieu’s triad: infrastructure.
We began this book by articulating the ambition of making future rural places better or at least thinking through the different ways in which those places might become better through actions that respect the unique characteristics and dynamics of place. Our approach to analysing current rural places and place-based interventions has been guided by Bourdieu’s theory of capitals (1986) – and especially by the proposition that social energy, transmutable from economic resources, is at once a source of development opportunity and spatial and social inequalities. More broadly, and like other researchers (for example Castle, 1998; Emery and Flora, 2006; Courtney and Moseley, 2008), we have explored the ‘placing’ and spatial interaction of a broader array of capitals as a basis for unpacking the complex realities of rural places – their materiality, symbolism and socio-economic practices. We have sought to understand how the ‘spatial energy’, rooted in capitals, can be channelled by planning and brought centre stage in the co-production of rural places with communities.
The book has been structured around four capitals that ‘make’ rural places: built, economic, land-based and socio-cultural capital. Our efforts to break these capitals into their constituent parts (a task undertaken in each thematic chapter) illustrates how each is inextricably linked to the others – the built with the economic, land with socio-cultural and so on. There can be no compartmentalising of these capitals; and yet in order to see how the smaller pieces, the assemblages, come together in the whole, it has been necessary to expose the individual parts and map the connections through case studies that hopefully reveal something of the nature of place capitals and also draw attention to the role of planning in its many guises, as a connective tissue that bonds and mobilises such capitals, framing the actions of different groups.
