The Hated Required Course

Research Methods

Photo: Alexander Grey

If Research Methods were an elective, you could cap the course at five and it would still be under-enrolled. Most students don’t consider Methods a fun class. There are no videos that eat up class time or discussions to BS your way through. The lectures are often dry and the homework is copious.

Faculty are not jumping at the chance to teach Research Methods. It’s a heavy lift. It takes a long time to devise creative assignments and write lectures; there is lots of grading, a distinct lack of enthusiasm from students, and the course evaluations are brutal.

Why do we do it?

Will our graduates get jobs in which they design, carry out, and write up the results of social or scientific research? Will our students become professional researchers, analysts, or academics? A few might find employment as consultants or survey researchers if they also studied statistics, but most won’t.

The Research Methods course is required not because it imparts job skills. Methods is a foundational course because it teaches critical thinking. Disciplining the mind to think logically and to perceive empirical reality accurately is crucial in our data-driven world. Understanding where information comes from and how to test its validity and reliability are valuable learning outcomes. Graduates must navigate a world characterized by rapid technological change, an overwhelming information space, and existential environmental challenges.

Student resistance to the methods course is not surprising. Rigorous analysis and logic are rarely taught in middle- and high school, so college students find critical thinking classes challenging. What American youth have experienced by the time they get to college is a deluge of marketing appeals, influencer videos, digital stimulation, and pressure to make quick judgements. Scroll and swipe is what they’re really good at. Enrolling in the research methods course—an analog learning experience par excellence—is not a choice made voluntarily.

How does a course in social science research design teach critical thinking? The course examines ways of thinking, ways of doing, and ethical considerations that connect thinking and doing. Here’s a research design overview:

Ways of Thinking

• Research problems can be approached from different philosophical starting points. Four world-views provide alternative research assumptions and illuminate different aspects of a problem. These perspectives are: empirical, constructivist, transformative, and pragmatic.

• How does theory help formulate a research question? How does a researcher choose which facts are relevant to a particular question?

• How to review the scientific literature in a particular field, identify the strengths and weaknesses of previous studies, and design a research study that avoids those weaknesses.

Ways of Doing

• How to utilize three types of research designs: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.

• How to determine which research design is most appropriate for a specific research question.

The Link Between Thinking and Doing

• What ethical issues are involved in data collection, reporting, and data storage? How can research activities fulfill ethical responsibilities?

Someone who passed Research Methods knows better than to jump down an internet rabbit hole and swallow crazy tales about lizard people, adrenochrome, and pedophile rings in pizza parlor basements. Our graduate is protected from the allure of internet conspiracies because she took Methods and knows what evidence-based research is.

If critical thinking combats misinformation and prepares students to participate in a technologically advanced society and a democratic polity, why do so many disparage higher education? Who’s against critical thinking?

Political reactionaries, that’s who. Wolves in bespoke clothing.

“I love the poorly educated!”

Emotional appeals from a populist leader more easily sway a poorly educated population. When people lack critical thinking skills, anger can be deflected to vulnerable minorities and scapegoats; economic exploitation and political control follow. The few dominate the majority.

An educated public can resist economic and political manipulation by would-be autocrats—so it’s no wonder reactionaries use their power to undermine liberal education. Campaigns against American educators didn’t start with Ron DeSantis. Movement conservatism began in the 1950s with McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare. The communications manual for this era’s young Republicans was William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale.

I picked up Buckley’s tome, to summarize the argument and show how it functioned as a political action program for movement conservatism. But that book is so annoying that my mind kept racing to review God and Man even as I tried to read it. My mental review included pungent phrases like: Buckley, a sophomoric perfector of purple prose . . . whose verbiage barely conceals . . . tendentious whining dressed up as an argument . . . . You get the picture.

Here’s a passage where Buckley complains that his tuition money—which should only pay for teaching activities—also supports the scholar’s research “avocation.” Buckley thinks (and I paraphrase): The professor is only working part-time for me, he has the freedom to express ideas that I don’t appreciate, and he gets to spend his afternoons doing “research”—which doesn’t contribute to my education (as I conceive it) or benefit me in any way.

From God and Man at Yale:

The educational overseer—the father who sends his son to school, or the trustee who directs the policy of the school—is violating no freedom I know of if he insists, let us say, that individualism instead of collectivism be inculcated in the school. Rather, he is asserting his own freedom. For if the educational overseer, in the exercise of his freedom, espouses a set of values, his is the inescapable duty and privilege to give impetus to these values in the classroom just as he does, from time to time, in the polling booth.

Good luck getting through Buckley’s gobbly-gook.

Heather Cox Richardson does a better job than I could explicating and contextualizing William F. Buckley’s work. Here’s a snippet from Richardson’s April 30th “Letter from an American” Substack:

The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.

Why? Because post-war liberalism was working: the American middle class was growing and a generation of World War II vets who would have otherwise stayed on farms or in factories had access to higher education. Because Congress was under Democratic control. Because the conservative movement wanted to roll back FDR’s New Deal, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the marijuana legalization movement, the immigrants rights movement, the abortion rights movement . . . .

But I digress

I can’t help it—whenever Buckley’s name comes up, I flash back to this . . .

. . . the notorious contretemps between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley. In 1968, ABC News chose these prominent intellectuals—Vidal from the left and Buckley from the right—to provide commentary during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. At the peak of anti-Vietnam war protests, the main action of the convention was occurring outside the Amphitheater with the demonstrators, and not inside with the delegates. If political tensions were high in the streets, they weren’t any lower in the television studio. Gore Vidal’s sympathies lay with the anti-war protesters; Buckley was on the side of reaction and repression.

Vidal: You must realize what some of the political issues are here. There are many people in the United States who happen to believe that the United States policy is wrong in Vietnam . . . . If [that idea] is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad, but I assume that the point of the American democracy—

Buckley: —and some people were pro-Nazi—

Vidal: —is you can express any view you want—

Buckley: —and some people were pro-Nazi—

Vidal: Shut up a minute!

Buckley: No, I won’t. Some people were pro-Nazi and, and the answer is they were well treated by people who ostracized them. And I’m for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don’t care—

Vidal: As far as I’m concerned, the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that—

Moderator Howard K. Smith: Let’s, let’s not call names—

Vidal: Failing that, I can only say that—

Buckley: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face, and you’ll stay plastered—

Smith: Gentlemen!

Gore Vidal called William F. Buckley a crypto-fascist and Buckley called him “you queer” and threatened to punch him in the face. So much for genteel conservatism. And this happened on a live prime-time network news broadcast. That’s what people remember.

The Democratic National Convention returns to Chicago this summer. I’m sure everything will be fine.

And now . . . your moments of amazing choreography.

CDK Company. A group of individual creatives coming together to share their work and passion for dance. Featuring the next generation of dancers in the Netherlands.

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Notes:

Sedona Chinn and Ariell Hassel, Support for “doing your own research” is associated with COVID-19 misperceptions and scientific mistrust.

John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches.

Eric W. Dolan, New study indicates conspiracy theory believers have less developed critical thinking abilities.

Josh Hafner, Donald Trump loves the 'poorly educated' — and they love him.

Anthony Lantian et al., Maybe a Free Thinker but not a Critical One: High Conspiracy Belief is Associated With low Critical Thinking Ability

PBS Independent Lens, Crypto Nazi and other Insults.

Wiki, Party Divisions of United States Congresses

April 30, 2024