Research Methods for Students, Academics and Professionals: Information Management and Systems

Citation

Williamson, K. (2004), "Research Methods for Students, Academics and Professionals: Information Management and Systems", Library Review, Vol. 53 No. 3, pp. 193-193. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530410526664

Library and information science at times appears to have something of an inferiority complex. It is not a discipline with a long history of clearly elaborated theoretical foundations and it exists firmly in the messy arena of real‐life practice and applications. This militates against purity of intellectual method and experimental elegance. In response to this, a number of recent works have tried to deal with the problem of LIS research methods, and at present Kirsty Williamson has drawn together a wide range of contributions to create an impressive volume that is the latest such attempt at methodological foundation – building.

Originally published in 2000, this new edition has four sections. An introductory set of four chapters outlines the two major schools of research (defined as positivism and interpretivism) while also including a chapter on ethics, new to this edition. The second and third sections form the bulk of the work (12 out of 18 chapters) are structured so as to separate the research “Methods” covered in section 2 from the research “Techniques” of section 3. This is a special feature, designed to loosen up the relationship between the techniques (such as questionnaires) and methods (such as surveys). Earlier texts have conflated the techniques and methods, but in separating them in this way Williamson and her co‐authors allow the reader to see flexible combinations between the two. For example, questionnaires are a technique that can be used for action research or case study research, so why should earlier works have identified them only as a technique for survey‐based research? This is a stimulating approach to the subject.

The “Methods” section is the longer of the two sections and takes the reader from well established methods such as survey, case study, experiment and system development, to those methods perhaps less familiar to the practitioner such as action research and ethnography. In each case the authors of these chapters place each method illuminatingly on the positivist/interpretivist scale, a consistency of approach that helps to give the reader a constant frame of reference as they move through some fairly demanding intellectual territory.

The fourth section on data analysis describes how to deal with the material gathered through the application of the methods and techniques described in the central sections, and is capped by a guide to the evaluation of published research and some final questions for the reader to take away with them. This is a stimulating if demanding coda.

This book succeeds in its aims of giving students, academics and professionals an effective guide to information research methods. Despite the density of much of its subject matter, it is really quite readable, and, despite travelling deep into the jungles of jargon, it uses special terminology responsibly, as a way of expressing difficult concepts for which there is no easy, everyday vocabulary (though one may cringe at the description of supermodel Elle Macpherson as a “hybrid homomorphic – isomorphic model” on p. 327).

Finally, it is noticeable that most of the examples of research given in the text are not primarily practitioner‐led. However, there is no reason for information professionals who read this work to feel that excellence in applied research is only really achievable by researchers focussing on practice. Let us hope that the 3rd edition will have more examples of wholly practitioner‐led research, perhaps generated by those in practice who have responded to the challenge of reading this book by generating high quality research of their own?