Examine How the Technique of Concept Mapping Assists the Research Design Process
The design for a research project is literally the plan for how the study will be conducted. It is a matter of thinking about, imagining, and visualizing how the research study will be undertaken (Green & Thorogood, 2007; Leedy & Ormrod, 2004; McTavish & Loether, 2002). Or as Valerie Janesick (1994, 1998) metaphorically describes: design is the choreography that establishes the research dance
It’s often unclear what information goes into a research design, and at what level of detail. One possibly useful rule of thumb is that you should write your plan with enough specificity that you could turn it over to several different people to implement, and they would all be able to do more or less the same study. For example, consider a research design that stated, “I will recruit a representative sample of subjects from the community for the interviews.” Really, it only states that sampling matters. It doesn’t tell us how to define the community, what makes people representative, or even how many subjects to aim for. In contrast, the statement, “I will identify two key informants from the neighborhood, and, using snowball sampling, recruit 15 subjects from each informant’s personal network” defines goals and criteria for inclusion. It tells the reader what you actually intend to do.
The most basic elements of research design involve conceptualizing the things you need to know, operationalizing the data collection that will tell you those things, and applying this data to your testable propositions. Each stage of research design involves a series of important decisions about the research idea or question(s). What types of information will be gathered and how will it be measured? This part of the design specifies the kind of data you need to answer your question or test your thesis. Where will the research be undertaken, and among what group or groups of people (questions of site, setting, and sample)? This part specifies how you will get the data that you just described as necessary. Finally, the design must include a data-analysis plan. Once you have the data you want, how will you use it to answer your question?
There are many other considerations to take into account along the way. You must decide whether to use a single data-collection strategy or to combine several strategies (data triangulation). Will you undertake the study alone or with the assistance of others (multiple investigator triangulation)? You must consider whether the study will be framed by a single overarching theory or by several related theories (theoretical triangulation). How much will the project cost in terms of time and money, and how much can you actually afford? Are the data-collection strategies appropriate for the research questions being addressed? What will the data (physically) look like once they have been collected? How will the data be organized and analyzed?
In effect, during the design stage, you, the investigator, sketch out the entire research project in an effort to foresee any possible glitches that might arise. If you locate a problem now, while the project is still on the drafting board, there is no harm done. After the project has begun, if you find that concepts have been poorly conceived, that the wrong research questions have been asked, or that the data collected are inappropriate or from the wrong group of people, the project may be ruined
In addition, the researcher must consider what Morse and Richards call the pacing of the project. By pacing, Morse and Richards (2002, p. 66) mean planning the sequence of various components of the study and the movement between data gathering and data analysis. This planning requires considerable decision making during the design stage and the flexibility to make additional changes during the course of the research: Once you select a data-collection strategy, say field observations, when do you start? Once you have begun, when do you stop? Should you include interviews along with your field observations, even though you did not originally plan to do so? All of these decisions affect the pace, duration, and design of your research.
Researchers in the social sciences typically conduct research on human subjects. The design stage is a time when you, the researcher, must consider whether ethical standards and safeguards for subjects’ protection are adequate. You must make certain that subjects will be protected from any harm. Chapter 3 discusses issues of research ethics in detail. For now, regard the design stage as the time when ethical proprieties such as honesty; open ness of intent; respect for subjects; issues of privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality; the intent of the research; and the willingness of subjects to participate voluntarily in the study are appraised
Concept Mapping
For many researchers, the development of a research design, creation of a theoretical framework, or even development or use of existing theories can be a very daunting task. At this juncture, therefore, I want to introduce a tool that can assist you in this process and that can also clarify confusions about a particular research design plan or theoretical framework you may want to use. This tool is referred to as concept mapping or occasionally mind mapping (Kane & Trochim, 2006; Maxwell, 2005; Novak, 1990). A concept map is a technique that allows you to better understand the relationships between ideas, concepts, plans of action, and the like by creating a pictorial representation of these ideas, or plans, and their connections. Concept maps allow you to visualize specific connections between ideas or activities you are thinking about, or to connect new ideas to knowledge that you already pos sess about a theory or concept. In effect, a concept map permits you to better organize your ideas and plans as you develop your research design or theoretical frame. It is quite literally your drawing board for working through research and theoretical plans
Most sources suggest that the original idea of concept maps can be traced to the work of Joseph Novak (Novak, 1990; Novak & Gowin, 1995) and his colleagues at Cornell University during the 1970s—first to explore the way students learned science and then as a tool for teaching science (Maxwell, 2005; Walker & King, 2002). To the casual observer, a concept map looks like a pretty standard flowchart; it is drawn with boxes or circles called nodes, and connections between various nodes are represented by lines, and sometimes arrows, and labels that identify what each node is and what the relationships are as represented by the lines. Together, these nodes, lines, and labels represent propositions or elements of meaning. Figure 2.2 shows a simple concept map for considering a theoretical framework for a study on health professionals’ perceptions of obese patients.
As Figure 2.2 illustrates, a concept map provides a means for organizing and thinking about the researcher’s notions about some subject or theoretical premise in a graphic or pictorial manner. This tool is particularly useful for social scientists in developing and detailing ideas and plans for research. It is especially valuable when researchers want to involve relevant stakeholder groups in the act of creating the research project, as when con ducting participatory research efforts (see Action Research in Chapter 7). It should be noted that typically one does not draft and complete a concept map all in one setting. Even the draft of the concept model shown in Figure 2.2 is largely a first draft that could be refined as the researcher developed additional information or narrowed his or her focus on specific issues. How then, you may be asking, do you go about creating a concept map?
Creating a Concept Maping
To create a concept map, you should first read widely on your subject; in short, begin examining the literature and amassing relevant documents on the topic. As you read through these documents, you should also begin to keep a record of about 10 or 12 key concepts or ideas. Once you have identified these concepts, you may follow these several steps to create a concept map:
Step 1: List out the concepts on one page. I use my laptop for this, but some people are more tactile and prefer to use post-it notes or small pad pages, writing a separate concept on each pad sheet or post-it page. The medium isn’t important, but it is important to be able to look at and move all of the concepts at once. This step should yield a good-sized bunch of individual concepts.
Step 2: Rearrange the concepts on the page so you move from the most abstract ideas to the most specific ones.
Step 3: Now, move the concepts on the page under separate columns, or create separate piles of notes so that ideas go directly below other related ideas. This stage gives you a physical layout that represents your conceptual arrangement of the parts. At this juncture, you also want to add additional concepts or labels that help to explain, connect, or expand the columns or piles of ideas you are creating
Step 4: At this point, you can move the columns into clusters of ideas located at some distance from each other, such that you can draw lines from the larger or broader concepts to the more specific and focused concepts and ideas. This allows you to view where your tight clusters of ideas separate from the looser, more distant interrelations.
Step 5: You are now ready to begin the process of making sense of the clustered ideas and connections you have created in the previous steps. In doing this, you should again review your literature and then begin to assign descriptive labels to the connections among the clusters of concepts or ideas. These terms and labels should explain or identify the relationships you see between these clusters of concepts or ideas
Step 6: You may want to separately describe examples, or even illustrations (pictures, cartoons) of actions that belong with and may illuminate the concepts and concept clusters.
Step 7: Now, you should reorganize the concepts so that the relationships among them are visually apparent. You may want to create a flowchart using various shapes (circles, squares, rectangles, etc.) to depict the arrangement of the concept and/or idea clusters and connective lines, as in Figure 2.2
Step 8: The final step is really a refining stage. You may want to show your cognitive plan to others knowledgeable about the general subject area or others working on your research team. From their comments, you may make changes and/or additions to your overall concept map.
One of the great benefits of concept mapping is that it distinguishes between concepts that depend on one another and ones which are distinct but related. For example, if you were to work out a concept map for socioeconomic status (SES), you would certainly need to work in qualitative and quantitative factors that indicate social status and those that indicate economic status. Income is part of SES, so you would need some measure for that. But you wouldn’t say that income relates to SES, because they are part of the same concept. Many of my students, recognizing that racial categories relate to SES in the United States, also try to fit race into their conceptualization. But race is a separate variable, one which can only be compared to SES because the two are different things
One of the great benefits of concept mapping is that it distinguishes between concepts that depend on one another and ones which are distinct but related. For example, if you were to work out a concept map for socioeconomic status (SES), you would certainly need to work in qualitative and quantitative factors that indicate social status and those that indicate economic status. Income is part of SES, so you would need some measure for that. But you wouldn’t say that income relates to SES, because they are part of the same concept. Many of my students, recognizing that racial categories relate to SES in the United States, also try to fit race into their conceptualization. But race is a separate variable, one which can only be compared to SES because the two are different things
Using a Concept Map
The concept map portrayed in Figure 2.2 provides a graphic representation of a theorized set of relations in the study of obesity and perceptions. The map groups together many ideas that pertain to the overall study into related conceptual blocks. The conceptual map suggests a series of relationships and a series of processes that relate the parts. With this map, we can make concrete statements and offer testable propositions about the social world in which teen obesity is experienced. It gives us tangible elements to look at when making sense of complex phenomena. A concept map is therefore highly useful for theorizing and predicting
The concept map also has a more technical use to help in the research design. By describing the conceptual processes that interest us, the map also tells us what data we need to measure. This data may be broken down into two parts: variables and relationships. For simplicity, let us consider a condensed concept map relating two characteristics or events: A ➞ B. This representation tells us that we are theorizing that some change in the state of whatever A is will cause a change in the state of whatever B is. There are, therefore, three things to operationalize and measure: the variable A, the variable B, and whatever variables represent the relationship between them.
How we proceed depends on the nature of our research question. If, for example, we only want a general and descriptive measure of whether A influences B, we might design a large-scale possibly quantitative study with a lot of data for both A and B, with which we can tell whether they correlate or not. But if the fact of this relationship has already been observed, then we will probably want to know how and why. In this case, neither A nor B are the key elements. The value of our study will depend on what we conceptualize for the arrow relating the parts and how we operationalize that.
An example might help. We have reason to believe that wealthy people vote more regularly than the work ing poor (or presumably the nonworking poor). So X is wealth, and Y is voting. But what is the “➞” about? One possibility is that people with less money feel more alien ated from the political system overall and do not believe that their votes will make a difference. In this model, the casual link is attitudinal, and we would have to opera tionalize measures for confidence, connection, alienation, expectations, and the like. Another possibility is that some portions of the population are encouraged to vote, such as car owners who receive registration forms through their motor vehicle departments, while others face barriers, such as densely populated voting districts with relatively few voting machines. In this model, the causal link is structural, and our investigations would need to measure experiences and perceptions of those experiences. The pictorial representation of the relationships among the parts translates directly into our necessary conceptualizations, and hence, our data-collection plan