{"id":668,"date":"2018-03-02T20:34:32","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T20:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.virginiasimulationallianceinc.org\/wordpress\/?p=668"},"modified":"2018-07-29T21:39:54","modified_gmt":"2018-07-29T21:39:54","slug":"research-blog-001-in-the-beginning-there-was-a-job-description","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.virginiasimulationallianceinc.org\/wordpress\/research-blog-001-in-the-beginning-there-was-a-job-description\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Blog 001: In the beginning there was a job description"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am the inaugural Director of Research and Publications in VASSA and, according to my official, VASSA job description, I am \u201cresponsible for initiating and providing services that enable members to develop, implement, and continue research concerning simulation.\u201d While trying to do that it occurs to me that some VASSA members don\u2019t yet know enough about research to \u201cdevelop, implement, and continue,\u201d so I have decided to initiate this blog series to describe what research is in hopes of enabling everyone to know enough about it to begin to want to become involved in it. My reasoning is simple (like me): If I can help you know enough about research to like it, then you can help yourself to develop, implement, and continue it. I, then, can sit back and goof off between answering occasional questions.<\/p>\n

First off (can I write that in the 2nd<\/sup> paragraph?) I confess that much of what I will write in these blogs is based on what I wrote in \u201cEvaluating research: Methodology for people who need to read research,\u201d which was published last year by Sage. I tell you this so you know my sources, and so that you know where to go if you want more information.<\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s begin (in the 3rd paragraph?) with a definition of research and some distinctions between scientific research and other ways of knowing things. The essence of research is that it is \u201ca critical process for asking and attempting to answer questions,\u201d in our case questions about simulation. There are two key words in this definition: critical and attempting. I use critical in the traditional sense of the word, an assessment of positive and<\/strong> negative qualities of a thing. I use attempt also in its traditional sense; research involves trying to get an answer, but it does not involve getting the<\/strong> answer. Scientific research one of the four practices that Peirce (1877<\/a>) described as ways of knowing or understanding things. Scientific research involves obtaining information through systematic, verifiable observations.<\/p>\n

The other three practices for knowing and understanding that Pierce described are a priori, authority, and tradition. A priori refers to pure logic. When someone says \u201cC\u2019mon, it\u2019s logical\u201d they are using the a priori method to convince you that something is correct. Authority involves accepting knowledge because it comes from a creditable source. We accept information because we trust the person who, literally or figuratively, says \u201cBecause I said so.\u201d Tradition relies on historical precedent; we accept something as correct because it\u2019s always been that way. In the Game of Thrones series, the Dothraki ended a discussion with the (translated into English) phase \u201cIt is known.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve always done it that way\u201d is another version of tradition.<\/p>\n

What makes scientific research different from the other three ways of knowing is that research is always critical and is self-correcting (Sagan, 1980<\/a>). Philosophy of Science is a wonderful discipline, but one could get lost in it for years and we don\u2019t have years, so I\u2019ll condense. The essence of why research is critical and self-correcting is that we always believe the data. (It does happen that sometimes people fabricate data, but that is quite rare.) Always \u201cbelieving\u201d the data means that observations are more important than the theories we develop to explain those observations. When we have contradictory data, for example, we don\u2019t declare that some of the data are wrong and keep our theory. When faced with contradictory data, we figure out a new explanation that incorporates all of the data; we change the theory to fit the data. I don\u2019t mean that we change our hypothesis to fit the data we collect\u2014that\u2019s HARKing (Kerr, 1998<\/a>). I mean that when we have contradictory studies we have to figure what is missing from our current understanding; we come up with a way that both studies might be correct and then we test that new explanation with a third study.<\/p>\n

So, step number one in becoming interested in research involves being willing to set aside the desire to prove that something is true. We have to be willing to accept the notion that our current understanding is not as good as it could be. We have to be willing to be critical (remember: positive and<\/strong> negative) and willing to be self-correcting. Essentially, we have to be willing to accept and act upon the belief that we don\u2019t know all there is to know and that some of what we will learn in the future will require that we change our minds about what we think he know. Think on that for a while, and, if you are still interested, come back for the next blog in the series.<\/p>\n

Cheers,<\/p>\n

Frank Dane<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Kerr, N. L. (1998). HARKing: Hypothesizing after the results are known. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2<\/em>(3), 196-217.<\/p>\n

Peirce, C. S. (1877). The Fixation of Belief. Popular Science Monthly, 12<\/em>(November), 1-15.<\/p>\n

Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos<\/em>. New York: Random House.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientific research is critical and self-correcting, not at all like the Dothraki.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[28,27,26],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-epistemology","tag-philosophy","tag-research"],"yoast_head":"\nResearch Blog 001: In the beginning there was a job description - VASSA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.virginiasimulationallianceinc.org\/wordpress\/research-blog-001-in-the-beginning-there-was-a-job-description\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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