Department of Law
MEMORANDUM
Date: January,
2007
To: M.A.
Students Enrolled in Legal Method and Social Inquiry
From: Professor
T. Brettel Dawson
Re: LAWS
5001W
_________________________________________________________________
I am looking forward to working with you in the
Legal Method and Social Inquiry course this year. I imagine that you will have
been introduced to a host of new ideas and approaches to thinking about law
during the first semester. These ideas may have shifted your thinking about
your focus or the kind of research you want to do in your thesis; or, you may
feel that they offer a rich reservoir of approaches to explore the same area of
inquiry that attracted you to the program. (Y)our job in the Laws 5001 is to
sort out ‘how you proceed’ from here so that you can settle into your thesis
topic, get going on your research and set out a realistic and achievable
schedule to successfully complete your thesis.
The book for the course is David Madsen, Successful
Dissertations and Theses; it will be available in the Bookstore. Our weekly
readings will include handouts, material posted at the course page on www.lawsite.ca or made available in the
Graduate Students room.
The course itself is built around ideas about
research in legal studies. Its main objective is to help you ask and answer
some questions about your own proposed thesis research (methodology) and in so
doing, be able to prepare a research proposal.
Ideally, you will be in a position after the class to finalize your draft
thesis proposal with your supervisor and then implement the research plan.
You must identify and sign up your thesis
supervisor early in the semester (if you haven’t already done so). I recommend
that you begin to meet with them, to include them in your thinking processes.
Their role is to be your sounding board, your guide and an enormous resource in
your subject area. My role is to be your sounding board, guide and resource
around issues of research design. I plan to bring in some speakers – expert
researchers and/or legal professionals who draw on research – to broaden and
ground our views on the processes and scope of legal research. I will also ask
you to read and talk about an M.A. thesis prepared in this program. I will urge
you to work on something that is important to you and a live issue in the
worlds of theory, policy and/practice. I will encourage you to ‘want to find an
answer’ to a problem, or anomaly, something that you are curious about or which
doesn’t make sense to you. Mostly I will try to convince you that research
(and, yes, writing too) can be interesting, enjoyable and immensely rewarding.
The rest of this letter suggests how you might
make a start on what might be a daunting prospect for you – the research proposal. A research
proposal will always be an individual piece of work rather than a formulaic or
uniform ‘product’. That said, the best advisors in the field suggest that there
are some components it should have which correspond to the sorts of questions
you need to resolve as you put your plan in place.
- The
first component is a ‘research
question’ or what the Graduate Student Handbook calls “the statement
of objectives” which requires you to "demonstrate clearly that [you
have] identified a potentially solvable, resolvable problem. It may be in
the form of a general statement and/or list of more specific aims"
and it should "make clear what is being sought."
- The
second component is to relate the proposed research question to existing
research knowledge. The Graduate Handbook outlines the role of the
statement of the ‘relation to
existing knowledge’ as being to “demonstrate the worthiness of the
proposed research” and notes that “it should underpin the statement of
objectives”. At a minimum you need to be able to establish that the
research you propose to do hasn’t already been
done and that it has intellectual relevance in that it addresses “gaps or
conflicts in present knowledge or understanding.”
- The
third component is the outline of
research (the research plan) should include an account “of the theory
(ies) that will be considered and the method(s)
that will be employed in selecting, organizing and analyzing the material
that will make up the main body of the thesis.” (Graduate Handbook). What this means is that you should be
able to state which theoretical framework you will be working within and
how it will guide how you select and analyse
your ‘research data’. Madsen suggests that you ask “is there a theory or a
variant of some theory, or a set of generalizations to which my research
has reference?” (Madsen, 71). You
will need to be able to identify what ‘data’ (sources of information), you
will be creating, examining or looking for and how you will go about doing
this (methodic practice). You may
have to acquire new method skills in order to do this – there are many
resources available to you in this process including texts and discussion
with your supervisor about methods. But you should note at the outset that
we will not be focusing or ‘teaching’ actual research methods in the
course.
- The
Proposal also has a bibliography.
- The
final element of the proposal are what could be
called “the promises”: what the
table of contents might look like, what the timeline is for completion of
each stage of the research and writing, who the supervisor is etc.
The starting point, then, is the ‘research
question’. You’ll hear this term a lot in the class. The first thing to note is
that the ‘research question’ isn’t a single phrase that distills your thoughts
into a short sentence completed with a question mark. Rather it describes the
problem that will animate your inquiry in the thesis and its context. The
process of shaping a research question has been referred to as an intensely
demanding intellectual process, with Madsen making the following observation,
the merit of which will come home to you throughout the semester: “Although a
good research question may seem to be reducible to a few seemingly simple
parts, the actual process of its formulation is anything but simple. Rather, it
is the product of the most vigorous intellectual effort and may,
in fact, be regarded as the quintessence of scholarship” (Madsen at 45).
What I would like you at the outset of the class
is to gather your thoughts towards preparing a research question.
First some key assumptions about where you are
starting:
- you have a general idea of the area that you
want to do research in (eg. Criminal justice
instead of electronic commerce etc);
- you
had something in mind that interested you when you applied to a research
intensive M.A. program in legal studies; and
- new
ideas will have come to you in the past few months:
Now, I suggest you address the following FOUR steps:
1. Reflect on what you have
been reading and thinking about:
Identify any key articles or
books that you already know about and have found particularly challenging or
stimulating in relation to your broad area of interest. You can also find ideas
from theses done by others as well: Dissertation Abstracts International
includes abstracts by the authors of dissertations in the
2. See if
you can identify a problem that has captured your interest:
There needs to be an "intellectual itch"
that makes you want to do research and good research often niggles away at
‘anomalies’ or things that don’t add up. Another way of getting at this is to
think about why you think research need to be done in the area that interests
you.
To help you get at this, take the following three
steps:
- First,
has an issue or concern drawn you to your general area or topic of
interest? If so, what have you noticed about it that bothers you; that
makes you think that more or different research is required? What’s wrong
or not working or unresolved or bothering you, specifically, in the area
or topic of interest? Is there a theoretical or practical anomaly? Have
politicians, judges, policy makers, scholars, and/or activists been doing
or saying something that doesn’t make sense?
- Second,
once you have an idea of a puzzle or problem, reflect on what about it
engages ‘law’, broadly understood as a “juridicial
field generated by the intersecting activities of agents and institutions”
related to rights, regulation and governance in our society (Hunt).
- Third,
think about your
"hunches" about this problem -- your preliminary explanation(s)
of what might be going on or at issue (the working thesis). This will
allow you to sharpen and focus your particular angle and approach to the
problem and clarify where you might want to take the research.
3. Identify what you want to find out.
What questions do you need to ask or, what lines of inquiry do you need
to explore? What is it that you don't know that will help you to
address/resolve the overall problem?
What are the relationships
between two or more factors or variables that you need to explore to set up a
good ‘research question’? A good RQ will be well-defined and focused on
specifics; and move from description towards making a claim about something.
What is the rationale (or justification) for the
research: what is the point of doing this research? What will your research
contribute to solving the problem? What will be significant or worth while
about doing the work?
- Finally,
review your conceptual baggage and any pre-judgment that may be in play:
Prejudgments
aren’t necessarily “a bad thing”. Gadamer (whose work
is cited by Neilson) argued that the interplay between one’s existing
cognitions or values (prejudgments) and elements of other cultures or new
theories is indeed the way that one develops new knowledge. In his view, in
order “to know”, one must be aware of one’s own prejudice. As such, throughout
the process of formulating and executing research it will be necessary to go
back and forth between old and new theories, paradigms, cultures or worldviews
to create a new synthesis (Neilson, 28).
Another
way of getting at some of this on a day-to-day level is to examine whether you
are bringing any conceptual baggage to the topic from previous experience or
research. This includes opinions or prejudices on the topic; particular
preferred goals or shaping worldviews that may be influencing how you are
looking at the topic. Teasing out the assumptions you have made in how you are phrasing your interest or
focus can be useful. Have you “coded in” any assumptions? Pulling these out
will help you ensure that you don’t end up asking a question in a way that will
influence or predetermine the outcomes of the research. In fact, Kirby and
McKenna suggest that you initiate an ongoing inventory of "conceptual
baggage" as part of this process throughout the whole period of work on
your thesis.
Good luck with this! I will look forward to
beginning our discussions. I can be contacted by email at bretteldawson@sympatico.ca.
References:
David Madsen, Successful Dissertations and Theses, 2nd ed. (San
Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1992).
Joyce McCarl Neilson, Feminist
Research Methods: Exemplars from the Social Sciences (Boulder, Col: Westview Press, 1990) 1-37
Sandra Kirby and Kate McKenna, Experience,
Research, Social Change (Toronto: Garamond, 1991).