It is debatable whether research necessarily leads to insights. It is instructive to examine the process of research and generation of insights. Why ‘findings’ may not lead to insights is an interesting point to pursue
Does research necessarily lead to insights? To many, the very question will seem to arise out of ignorance. Especially at a time the world is awash with ‘analytics’ and repeated advice from all and sundry how informed decisions can be taken based on research. Don’t we talk of R&D? Don’t we ask ‘researchers’ how deep is their research? And so on.
And yet, this is a fair question and one demanding an answer, just as any relevant question does.
Let us start, albeit tentatively, with this observation that research leads to ‘findings’ and explore where it takes us. Assuming that the research is undertaken to find something specific such as say case law in a legal matter, research will uncover relevant stuff or fail. There may even be many ‘findings’ which don’t hold together and which have to be explained. It is possible also that we may stumble upon things we didn’t expect. The world of scientific research often encounters such bonuses. We will examine this sometime later while staying with our original intent here.
Perhaps answers to a research question or a set of research questions. Such research could take the form of laboratory experiments which throws up a lot of data. There are time when such ‘data’ is perplexing and leads to more research questions. A fair bit of developments in quantum mechanics in the last few years bears testimony to this. Anyone who has read crime fiction will be able to relate to the observation that a surfeit of evidence may make solving the crime vastly more difficult. Examine, if you wish, the research into the Great Depression of the 1930s, which must have produced several PhDs. Or the renewed interest in the French revolution or Nazi Germany, leading to more questions leading to more research. In many cases, declassified official documents have generated enormous interest in particular events or a period. In all such cases, insight has never seemed obvious and foregone.
In fact, as we ‘find’ more (and more) we may refine our original question or questions which may call for a redirecting of our research. Will this redirection constitute an insight, at least for the purpose of the conduct of the research itself? In some instances, instead of any redirection, the original research opens up new vistas for enquiry. The world of mathematics is replete with such examples but we won’t get into that now.
As the volume of data grows, the task is to explain it, make sense of it but there is no guarantee that a researcher can provide it. It is not uncommon to come across expressions such as ‘this is what research indicates’. This ‘making sense’ will become more and more challenging as research uncovers more and more findings or ‘data’. The problem is also whether the data that gets gathered or ‘found’ is of one kind or several.
Part of the challenge is to decide how much data is enough. As the volume of data grows, managing it becomes an arduous task, especially if the data is multi-dimensional. Unless you are researching an extremely narrowly defined topic, the growing volume of data is a tough challenge. In fact, this is the case even with a narrowly defined topic. We are faced with a serious question? What are the interrelationships amongst the data that we gather? Are they linear or nonlinear? What variables should be considered together what other variables? Is there a difference between findings and perspective? It does seem so. A perspective is based on an angle of vision, a framework that ‘makes sense’ of whatever is ‘found’ through research. That perspective may have emerged out of research but is not necessarily so. It may even be based on prior readings.
One of the skills you need to learn (in and for research) is deciding when to stop gathering more information, even if only temporarily, before you step back and try to make sense of the you have already gathered. This is particularly important if what you have gathered is what is normally understood as ‘big data’, which is largely unstructured data. This could even help redirect your further search.
Ideally, you should start with research questions, based on a preliminary understanding of a problem. However, it is not easy to pose such questions but this is absolutely the starting point. You might revise the question later but you need a starting point. The only caveat is to get it reasonably correct, lest you have to retrace the very direction of your probe. It will help a great deal if you could identify what are the factors that you are looking for and what could the relationship be amongst them. Unravelling relationships is critical but is that insight? Debatable.
Takeaways
Research leads to findings, not necessarily insights
Information uncovered by research may pose more questions
Research questions are important to organize the information
