SUBJECT: PRACTICAL RESEARCH 1

What is Research?
- Central to research is your way of discovering new knowledge, applying knowledge in various ways as well
as seeing relationships of ideas, events, and situations. Research then puts you in a context where a
problem exists.
– It requires you to inquire or investigate about your chosen research topic by asking questions that will make
you engage yourself in top-level thinking strategies of interpreting, analyzing, synthesizing, criticizing,
appreciating, or creating to enable you to discover truths about the many things you tend to wonder about
the topic of your research work (Litchman, 2013)
– Research is a process of executing various mental acts for discovering and examining facts and information
to prove the accuracy or truthfulness of your claims or conclusions about the topic of your research
INQUIRY
– A learning process that motivates you to obtain knowledge or information about people, things, places, or
events
– You do this by asking questions about something you are inquisitive about. It requires you to collect data,
meaning, facts, and information about the object of your inquiry, and examine such data carefully.
– Putting you in a situation where you need to probe, investigate, or ask questions to find answers or solutions
to what you are worried or doubtful about, inquiry is a problem-solving technique
– Inquiry-based Learning gets its support from three educational theories serving as its foundation
– Solving a problem by being inquisitive, you tend to act like scientist who are inclined to think logically or
systematically in seeking evidence to support their conclusions about something.
– Inquisitive thinking allows you to shift from one level of thought to another. It does not go linear fashion;
rather, it operates in an interactive manner
John Dewey’s theory of connected experiences for exploratory and reflective thinking
Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) that stresses the essence of provocation and scaffolding in
learning
Jerome Bruner’s theory on learner’s varied world perceptions for their own interpretative thinking of people and
things around them.

Benefits of Inquiry-Based Learning

1. Elevates interpretative thinking through graphic skills
2. Improves student learning abilities
3. Widens learners’ vocabulary
4. Facilitates problem-solving acts
5. Increases social awareness and cultural knowledge
6. Encourages cooperative learning
7. Provides mastery of procedural knowledge
8. Encourages higher-order thinking skills
9. Hastens conceptual understanding

Characteristics of Research
1. Accuracy. It must give correct or accurate data, which the footnotes, notes, and bibliographical entries
should honestly and appropriately documented or acknowledged
2. Objectiveness. It must deal with facts, not with mere opinions arising from assumptions, generalizations,
predictions, or conclusions.
3. Timeliness. It must work on a topic that is fresh, new, and interesting to the present society.
4. Relevance. Its topic must be instrumental in improving society or in solving problems affecting the lives of
people in a community.
5. Clarity. It must succeed in expressing its central point or discovered by using simple, direct, concise, and
correct language
6. Systematic. It must takes place in an organized or orderly manner.
7. Empirical. Research is based on direct experience or observation by the researcher.

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 8. Logical. Research is based on valid procedures and principles.
9. Cyclical. Research is a cyclical process because it starts with a problem and ends with a problem.
10. Analytical. Research utilizes proven analytical procedures in gathering the data, whether historical,
descriptive, and experimental and case study.
11. Critical. Research exhibits careful and precise judgement.
12. Methodical. Research is conducted in a methodical manner without bias using systematic method and
procedures.
13. Replicability. The research design and procedures are replicated or repeated to enable the researcher
to arrive at valid and conclusive results.

Purposes of Research
 to learn how to work independently
 To learn how to work scientifically or systematically
 To have an in-depth knowledge of something
 To elevate your mental abilities by letting you think in higher-order-thinking strategies (HOTS) of inferring,
evaluating, synthesizing, appreciating, applying, and creating
 To improve your reading and writing skills
 To be familiar with the basic tools of research and the various techniques of gathering data and of presenting
research findings
 To free yourself, to certain extent, from the domination or strong influence of a single textbook or of the
professor’s lone viewpoint or spoon feeding
Types of Research
1. Descriptive Research.
 This type of research aims at defining or giving a verbal portrayal or picture of a person, thing, event, group,
situation, etc.
 This is liable to repeated research because its topic relates itself only to a certain period or a limited number
of years. Based on the results of your descriptive studies about a subject, you develop the inclination of
conducting further studies on such topic.
2. Correlational Research
 Shows relationships or connectedness of two factors, circumstances, or agents called variables that affect
the research.
 It is only concerned in indicating the existence of a relationship, not the causes and ways of the development
of such relationship
3. Explanatory Research
 This type of research elaborates or explains not just the reasons behind the relationships of two factors, but
also the ways by which such relationship exists.
4. Exploratory Research
 An exploratory research’s purpose is to find out how reasonable or possible it is to conduct a research study
on a certain topic. Here, you will discover ideas on topics that could trigger your interest in conducting
research studies
5. Action Research
6. -This type of research studies an ongoing practice of a school, organization, community, or institution for
the purpose of obtaining results that will bring improvements in the system.
NOTE:
-If the study deals with concepts, principles, or abstract things, it is pure research. This type of research aims to
increase your knowledge about something.
- If your intention is to apply your chosen research to societal problems or issues, finding ways to make positive
changes in society, you call your research, applied research.

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QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Characteristics of a Qualitative Research
1. Human understanding and interpretation
- Data analysis results show an individual’s mental, social, and spiritual understanding of the world. Hence,
through their worldviews, you come to know what kind of human being he or she is, including his or her values,
beliefs, likes, and dislikes.
2. Active, powerful, and forceful
- a lot of changes occur continuously in every stage of a qualitative research. As you go through the research
process, you find the need to amend or rephrase interview questions and consider varied ways of getting
answers, like shifting from mere speculating to travelling to places for data gathering.
-You are not fixated to certain plan. Rather, you are inclined to discover your qualitative research design as
your study gradually unfolds or reveals itself in accordance with your research objectives.
3. Multiple research approaches and methods
- Qualitative research allows you to approach or plan your study in varied ways. You are free to combine this
with quantitative research and use all gathered data and analysis techniques. Being a multi-method
research, a qualitative study applies to all research types: descriptive, exploratory, explanatory, case study,
etc.
4. Specificity to generalization
- specific ideas in a qualitative research are directed to a general understanding of something. It follows an
inductive or scientific method of thinking, where you start thinking of particular or specific concept that will
eventually lead you to more complex ideas such as generalizations or conclusions
5. Contextualization
- A quantitative research involves all variables, factors, or conditions affecting the study. Your goal here is to
understand human behavior. Thus, it is crucial for you to examine the context or situation of an individual’s
life – the who, what, why, how, and other circumstances – affecting his or her way of life.
6. Diversified data in real-life situations
- A qualitative researcher prefers collecting data in a natural setting like observing people as they live and
work, analyzing photographs or videos as they genuinely appear to people, and looking at classrooms
unchanged or adjusted to people’s intentional observations.
7. Abounds with words and visuals
- words, words, and more words come in big quantity in this kind of research. Data gathering through
interviews or library reading, as well as the presentation of data analysis results, is done verbally. In some
cases, it resorts to quoting some respondents’ answers. Likewise, presenting people’s world views through
visual presentation (i.e., pictures, videos, drawings, and graphs) are significantly used in a qualitative
research.
8. Internal Analysis
- Here, you examine the data yielded by the internal traits of the subject individuals (i.e., emotional, mental,
spiritual characteristics) You study people’s perception or views about your topic, not the effects of their
physical existence on your study.
Types of Qualitative Research
1. Case Study
- This type of qualitative research usually takes place in the field of social care, nursing, psychology,
rehabilitation centers, education, etc. This involves a long-time study of a person, group, organization, or
situation.
-It seeks to find answers to why such thing occurs to the subject. Finding the reason/s behind such
occurrences drives you to also delve into relationships of people related to the case under study.
2. Ethnography
- Falling in the field of anthropology, ethnography is the study of a particular cultural group to get a clear
understanding of its organizational set-up, internal operation, and lifestyle.
-A particular group reveals the nature or characteristics of their own culture through the world perceptions of
the cultural group’s members.
3. Phenomenology
- Coming from the word “phenomenon,” which means something known through sensory experience,
phenomenology refers to the study of how people find their experiences meaningful. Its primary goal is to make
people understand their experiences about death of loved ones, care for handicapped persons, friendliness of

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 people, etc. in doing so, other people will likewise understand the meaning attached to their experiences. Those
engaged in assisting people to manage their own live properly often do this qualitative kind of research

Types of Qualitative Research

1. Content and Discourse Analysis
- Content analysis is a method of quantitative research that requires an analysis or examination of the substance
or content of the mode of communication (letters, books, journals, photos, video recordings, SMS, online
messages, emails, audio-visual materials, etc.) used by a person, group, organization, or any institution in
communicating.

2. Historical Analysis
- Central to this qualitative research method is the examination of primary documents to make you understand
the connection of past events to the present time. The results of your content analysis will help you specify
phenomenological changes in unchanged aspects of society through the years.

Research Topics To Be Avoided

1. Controversial Topics. These are topics that depend greatly on the writer’s opinion, which may tend to be
biased. Facts cannot support topics like these.
2. Highly Technical Subjects. For a beginner, researching on topics that require an advanced study, technical
knowledge, and vast experience is a very difficult task.
3. Hard-to-investigate subjects. A subject is hard to investigate if there are no available reading materials
about it and if such materials are not up-to-date.
4. Too broad subjects. Topics that are too broad will prevent you from giving a concentrated or an in-depth
analysis of the subject matter of the paper. The remedy to this is to narrow or limit the topic to a smaller one.
5. Too narrow subjects. These subjects are so limited or specific that an extensive or through searching or
reading for information about these s necessary.
6. Vague subjects. Choosing topics like these will prevent you from having a clear focus on your paper. For
instance, titles beginning with indefinite adjectives such as several, many, some, etc. (E.g. “Some
Remarkable Traits of a Filipino” or “Several People’s Comments on the RH Law) are vague enough to
decrease the reader’s interests and curiosity.

SOURCES of RESEARCH TOPICS:

1. Mass media communication – press (newspapers, ads, TV, radio, films, etc.)
2. Books, Internet, peer-reviewed journals, government publications
3. Professional periodicals like College English Language Teaching Forum, English Forum, The Economist,
Academia, Business Circle, Law Review, etc.
4. General periodicals such as Reader’s Digest, Women’s Magazine, Panorama Magazine, Time Magazine,
World Mission Magazine, etc.
5. Previous reading assignments in your other subjects
6. Work Experience – clues to a researchable topic from full-time or part-time jobs, OJT (on-the-job training)
experience, fieldwork, etc.

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