Describe the three basic goals of research reports.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The research report will present research findings and interpretations in a way that reflects some combination of the researcher’s goals, the research sponsor’s goals, the concerns of the research subjects, and, perhaps, the concerns of a wider anticipated readership. Understanding the goals of these different groups will help the researcher begin to shape the final report even at the beginning of the research. In designing a proposal and in negotiating access to a setting for the research, commitments often must be made to produce a particular type of report or, at least, to cover certain issues in the final report. As the research progresses, feedback about the research from its participants, sponsoring agencies, collaborators, or other interested parties may suggest the importance of focusing on particular issues in the final report. Social researchers traditionally have tried to distance themselves from the concerns of such interested parties, paying attention only to what is needed to advance scientific knowledge. But in recent years, some social scientists have recommended bringing these interested parties into the research and reporting process itself.
Advance Scientific Knowledge -- Most social science research reports are directed to other social scientists working in the area of study, so they reflect orientations and concerns that are shared within this community of interest. The so scientific approach encourages a research goal to advance scientific knowledge by providing reports to other scientists. This approach also treats value considerations as beyond the scope of science: “An empirical science cannot tell anyone what he should do but rather what he can do and under certain circumstances what he wishes to do” (Weber, 1949).
The idea is that developing valid knowledge about how society is organized or how we live our lives does not tell us how society should be organized or how we should live our lives. There should, as a result, be a strict separation between the determination of empirical facts and the evaluation of these facts as satisfactory or unsatisfactory (Weber, 1949). Social scientists must not ignore value considerations, which are viewed as a legitimate basis for selecting a research problem to study. After the research is over and a report has been written, many scientists also consider it acceptable to encourage government officials or private organizations to implement the findings. During a research project, however, value considerations are to be held in abeyance.
Shape Social Policy -- As we highlighted in our discussion of applied research in Chapter 10, many social scientists seek to social policy through their writing. By now, you have been exposed to several such examples in this text, including all the evaluation research. These particular studies, like much policy-oriented social science research, are similar to those that aim strictly to increase knowledge. In fact, these studies might even be considered contributions to knowledge first and to social policy debate second. What distinguishes the reports of these studies from strictly academic reports is their attention to policy implications.
Other social scientists who seek to influence social policy explicitly reject the traditional scientific, rigid distinction between facts and values (Sjoberg & Nett, 1968). Bellah and colleagues (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985) have instead proposed a model of “social science as public philosophy,” in which social scientists focus explicit attention on achieving a more just society:
Social science makes assumptions about the nature of persons, the nature of society, and the relation between persons and society. It also, whether it admits it or not, makes assumptions about good persons and a good society and considers how far these conceptions are embodied in our actual society.
Social science as public philosophy, by breaking through the iron curtain between the social sciences and the humanities, becomes a form of social self-understanding or self-interpretation.... By probing the past as well as the present, by looking at “values” as much as at “facts,” such a social science is able to make connections that are not obvious and to ask difficult questions.
This perspective suggests more explicit concern with public policy implications when reporting research results. But it is important to remember that we all are capable of distorting our research and our interpretations of research results to correspond to our own value preferences. The temptation to see what we want to see is enormous, and research reports cannot be deemed acceptable unless they avoid this temptation.
Organize Social Action—Participatory Action Research
For the same reasons that value questions are traditionally set apart from the research process, many social scientists consider the application of research a nonscientific concern. William Foote Whyte, whose Street Corner Society (1943) study you encountered in Chapter 8, has criticized this belief and proposed an alternative research and reporting strategy he calls participatory action research (PAR). Whyte (1991) argues that social scientists must get “out of the academic rut” and engage in applied research to develop better understanding of social phenomena.
Participatory action research: A type of research in which the researcher involves some organizational members as active participants throughout the process of studying an organization; the goal is making changes in the organization.
In PAR, the researcher involves as active participants some members of the setting studied. Both the organizational members and the researcher are assumed to want to develop valid conclusions, to bring unique insights, and to desire change, but Whyte (1991) believed that these objectives were more likely to be obtained if the researcher collaborated actively with the persons he or she studied. PAR can bring researchers into closer contact with participants in the research setting through groups that discuss and plan research steps and then take steps to implement research findings. Stephen Kemmis and Robin McTaggart (2005) summarize the key features of PAR as “a spiral of self-reflecting cycles” involving
• planning a change,
• acting and observing the process and consequences of the change,
• reflecting on these processes and consequences,
• planning again, and
• acting and observing again.
In contrast with the formal reporting of results at the end of a research project, these cycles make research reporting an ongoing part of the research process.