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Research in Construction Engineering: the nature of questions asked

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 ASOCSA2008-28

Research in Construction Engineering: the

nature of questions asked
Ian Geoffrey Kennedy
School of Construction, Economics and Management,
University of the Witwatersrand

Abstract
Purpose of this paper
The objective of this research was to categorize and assess the nature of
construction engineering project questions that were proposed for final year
research.

Method
Research questions proposed by construction engineering students were collected
over two years. Common words in the field were identified. Also, questioning
words were identified and tabulated, and their general nature were categorised.
Results were then compared with questioning words in a scholarly database of 2
840 000 papers that mention “construction engineering”.

Findings
Generally, the types of approved research questions posed are appropriate.
Research questions seeking an explanation were popular, and most questions posed
include a word indicating the general area of research. Students do ask the type of
questions similar to scholars in the field, and should continue to do so.

Research limitations
The categorising of the students' question types does not cover topics for research.
Nevertheless it enlightens us as to what creative young engineers starting in the
field see as needing researching.

Research implications
It is recommended that future students be given a list of the appropriate words for
starting their research questions.

KEYWORDS: Construction engineering education, students starting proposals

 Research directions in Construction Engineering

Introduction
We develop the industry through higher education. Well-educated graduates should
add to our knowledge base, through their research projects. As the author has
written before: “We should formally educate engineers in how to do research”
(Kennedy 1992). More specifically: “Creating lifelong learners implies that we
must teach research and investigative methods to our students” (Kennedy 2004).

An appropriate question to ask then is “What is the nature of the research questions
that we should be asking and teaching?” For example, the nature of research
questions beginning with the words what, why, and how differ, and they result in
answers with differing depths of insight.

Research methods are taught as a subject at the University of the Witwatersrand as

a mandatory half year course to 3rd year construction engineering students by the
author to prepare them for their final year, capstone project, the so-called discourse
of their 4th and final year of their Bachelors degree. Students have free, unbiased
choice of research question. The wide range of creative questions that the students
have posed is impressive, and this paper reports on an analysis of the nature of their
questions supplied for their first assignment and draws a comparison with the
nature of questions in the scholarly literature in the field.

In their first assignment in the research methods class, students generate a research
question from their field of interest and submit it for comment by E-mail for marks.
Each submission had to start with a questioning word, and had to end with a
question mark. This paper reports on research conducted on this Assignment 1
only, as it is their key first step towards their final year project.

Currently, the students are required to prepare individual proposals as the outcome
of their 3rd year course but must pair up in teams of two for the 4th year project as
more that 100 projects cannot be satisfactorily supervised and marked by the
current staff numbers. (An oral exam is used in 4th year to give different marks to
the individuals in each team.) Because students subsequently work in pairs, half the
questions proposed during 3rd year are never researched.

The majority of construction engineering research proposals that were analysed

sought to find answers mainly through qualitative research. Some proposals were
not ambitious enough or were naively too ambitious, while the majority were right-
sized.

Didactic approach
To heavily paraphrase (Vygotsky, 1978), the purpose of lecturing is to bring the
students from where they are, to where they can be. A gap analysis is therefore
appropriate: Third year students have never seen a research proposal, never mind
written one. They usually have never prepared a critical review of a research paper.
Most have never even read a research paper. The lecturer must build a bridge
Research Directions in Construction Engineering 3

across this chasm. He does this through a process of divide-and-conquer, where

each construct serves as a pillar to support the remaining construction. A
description of the pillars (assignments) required of the students (Kennedy, 2008)
and rationales follows.

There are four steps to any project cycle, including a construction project and even
a research project: 1. Prepare. 2. Plan. 3. Process. 4. Produce the product.

Students follow steps 1 and 2 this year and finish with steps 3 and 4 next year. The
outcome of this year is an individual research proposal and its sections (“The
Blueprint”); the outcome of next year is their group's discourse / final year project
report / thesis and its chapters (“The Building”). The blueprint is not the building,
but a necessary step towards making the building. Many weak students did not
internalize this last sentence and offered long, rambling, incoherent, discursive
essays replete with phrases like “This research showed ...”!

Steps 1 and 2 are expanded over four assignments, Assignments 1-4

(Kennedy, 2008):
1. Create a research question: Students are asked to choose a question of
their own making so that they will take ownership.
2. Find a gap and state the thesis: Students are encouraged to find two
papers or Web sites based on the key words in the research question from
assignment 1 that intriguingly say contradictory things or which, taken
together show an interesting gap that needs to be researched. They then
have to restate the question as a thesis statement, and this forces them to
take a stance.
3. Compile, organize and critically review related literature: Students are
next helped to find seven more references to form a reading list, by
searching for works that use the vocabulary and authors and other leads as
discovered in their two key references from assignment 2. As they are
unfamiliar with how to critically review material, they have to use the
supplied Kennedy template to create a critical review of each the nine
documents. After this, they are required to categorise and sort their
material logically and summarize their reading.
4. Draw up a draft research project proposal: Students are then required
to expand assignment 2 into the first section of a research proposal, and
from assignment 3 into the second section of a research proposal. They
are then forced to think before writing a third section on the proposed
methods and materials. Great clarity results from requiring them to
include further sections giving the proposed chapter headings for the final
report as well as a budget and schedule of work. Finally, plagiarism is
discouraged by requiring a reference list to all works that they have cited
in the proposal.
 Research directions in Construction Engineering

Method
This paper reports on research conducted on Assignment 1 only, as it is the key
first step. As their first assignment, the students submitted their research questions
by e-mail to the lecturer, who suggested logical and grammatical improvements to
the questions and then recorded the approved question in a spreadsheet. The
questions from the two years of running the course were merged. The questions
were cleaned up where the student had not complied with the lecturer's requirement
that each submission had to start with a questioning word, and had to end with a
question mark. This gave 119 questions from 2006 and 95 from the smaller class of
2007, providing a database of 214 questions, which was then sorted alphabetically.
Repeat students were not allowed to reuse their previous question, and every
student had to provide an individual question. Hence there were no duplicate
entries in the database. The first question alphabetically in the database was “Are
lowering standards of building being caused by greed?” The last question in the
database was “Will the removal of all shacks and the substitution of RDP housing
be possible before 2010?” Many the students chose topics that were topical or
important and even current in the scholarly literature. (Think of Green Building or
Safety.) However, this paper concentrates on the nature of the questions and not on
the hierarchy of our knowledge base or what areas we should be researching.

Analysis of questions

Length of the posed research questions

The recommended length of a research question was 12 words +/- 2 words. The
actual lengths varied from 4 to 46 words. The shortest question posed was a
parsimonious 4 words:
“When are ICCs feasible?” (International Conference Centres)

The longest required 46 words to specify the question precisely:

“Why is it that Professional Quantity Surveyors operate primarily to save the

Client involved money and yet a Contracts QS working for the contracting
company works to get more or just the agreed contract sum when both have the
same knowledge of the Quantity Surveying profession?”

Starting words of research questions posed

The starting words of the questions were tabulated, sorted and categorised into
similar categories. E.g., “Do” and “Does” questions were merged into one
category.

Results
According to (Phillips & Pugh: 1987) “Research ... looks for explanations,
relationships, comparisons, predictions, generalizations and theories.” This is the
Research Directions in Construction Engineering 5

best analysis of research types that the author can find. It is infinitely more useful
than saying to students that research may be quantitative, qualitative or mixed. Nor
does the author subscribe to the gross simplification of some authors (Bausell,
1986) who would have us believe that “research questions always reduce to
comparisons”.

Table 1 shows the popularity of various starting words for questions. The last
column in Table 1 broadly categorises the type of research question posed as being
one seeking to answer an Explanation / Relationship / Comparison / Prediction /
Generalization or Theory type of research question. The table reveals the
surprisingly high degree of creativity of the students. The overwhelmingly popular
starting words for the questions were “How can / could...?” followed by “What are
the... ?” and “How does... ?” indicating that research seeking an explanation was
popular.

Table 28.1. Popularity of starting words for research questions

Question word No. Type

How can / could 62 E
What are the 21 R
How do / does 19 E
Is /Are 16 R
What (other) 14 R
To what degree / extent 11 R
Why is / are / do / should 8 R
Do / Does 7 E
What is the benefit /effect / impact / value of 7 R
What economic / effect / factors / forms / future 6 E/R/P
How are / is 5 E
How has / have 5 R

How may / might / will 4 P

When are / will / would 4 P
Has / Have 3 R
How feasible / economic / sustainable 3 P
What challenges / dangers 3 P
What impact does / did 3 P
How much of 2 P
In what ways does 2 R
What causes / determines 2 E
 Research directions in Construction Engineering

Which 2 C
Could 1 P
Is it more economical 1 C
What finance 1 P
Who bears 1 P
Will 1 P

Total 214

At the bottom of Table 28.1, Predictive-type (P) research questions were not
popular. This was partly in response to the lecturer actively warning students of the
risks of attempting to answer long-term research questions. Comparison-type (C)
research questions only appeared in the middle and bottom of the table. This was
partly in response to the lecturer warning students not to adopt overly simplistic
questions. Generalization (G) and Theory-type questions are only expected in post-
graduate research and were not suggested by the undergraduates. This result
reflects the level of intellectual inquiry expected at this stage of the students’
educational development.

It appears that the hidden agenda of the lecturer to get the students to generate
answerable, academic research questions was generally achieved.

Frequency of other words

Table 28.2 lists the most frequently occurring (non-common) words in the
remainder of the questions, and how frequently they appeared in the 214 questions.

Table 28.2. No. of non-common, frequent words in the research questions

Non-common but frequent word No.

Construction 110
Industry 36
Building 17
Property 15
Quantity surveyors / surveying 14

Table 28.2 shows that most questions posed include a word indicating the general
area of research, which is always advisable.
Research Directions in Construction Engineering 7

Comparison with the literature in Scholar

Further work was done to compare these results with scholarly research. A database
of scholarly papers was selected. A subset of Google.Scholar was conceptually
formed that contained the phrase “construction engineering” anywhere in the paper.
This subset, here called the scholarly database, contained 2 840 000 papers
(Scholar, 2008). It was not possible to determine how many papers used the words
“Is”, “Do”, “Does”, “Are”, “Has”, “Have”, “Which”, and “Could” as these
extremely common words in English are stop words that the search engine does not
allow to be used in searches. Removing these questions from the students' questions
left 170 questions. The frequency of the student's questions was compared with the
frequencies in the scholarly database. The results appear in Table 28.3.
 Research directions in Construction Engineering

Table 28.3. Comparison of student questions not using stop words with scholarly
database

No. of
No. of Ratio of No. of
Papers in
Question word Students Papers to
scholarly
asking Students
database
How can / could 62 145600 2348
What are the 21 86800 4133
How do / does 19 170500 8974
To what degree / extent 11 77400 7036
Why is / are / do / should 8 130600 16325 +
What is the benefit / effect /
7 6364 909 -
impact / value of
What economic /effect /factors
6 29090 4848
/forms /future
How are / is 5 88700 17740 +
How has / have 5 15140 3028
How may / might / will 4 38050 9513
When are / will / would 4 9630 2408
How feasible / economic /
3 4532 1511
sustainable
What challenges / dangers 3 1101 367
What impact does / did 3 1312 437
How much of 2 30700 15350
In what ways does 2 731 366
What causes / determines 2 12350 6175
Is it more economical 1 46 46
What finance 1 36 36
Who bears 1 1580 1580
Total Total Average
170 850262 5156

The last numeric column in Table 28.3 gives the ratio of papers found containing
the question word to the number of students asking that type of question. Important
outliers are flagged and discussed below.

Discussion
In general, the results show that the nature of research questions that are being
posed are appropriate. Supervisors and supervision in the areas of interest must
then be provided.
Research Directions in Construction Engineering 9

Table 3 reveals that in order to get publishable papers, naïve students need to ask
research questions of the type “Why is ...?” and “How are ...?” rather than
questions of the type “What is the effect of ... ?” However, it is still correct and
useful for senior undergraduates to start their research careers with controlled
experiments or questionnaires that seek to find the effect of one variable on
another.

Limitations of this research

The research compared students' research questions with words that appeared
anywhere in the text of scholarly papers mentioning construction engineering. The
research is limited in that the analysis was only of words, and did not take their
context into account. Nor did the study compare the students' questions with
research material appearing only in print, and not indexed by Scholar.

Conclusion
This work has shown what questions students do produce, and reflected on
our educational practice. In general, the students can pose creative questions in
the field, and only need some guidance with right-sizing the scope of the work, and
fixing their grammatical errors.

Twice as many questions are posed than can be handled. In 2006, this led to
disgruntlement among the students who had to “sell” the proposal to potential
partners, who were trying to do the same themselves. In the end, the most suitable
research proposal should survive, and the students learn valuable interpersonal
skills as they work in pairs in final year.

Students are headed in the right directions in their construction engineering

research. Students are asking the right nature of questions, and should continue to
do so.

Recommendations
It is recommended that further work be undertaken to establish if the directions that
are being targeted by students and by published scholars are in fact the directions
that the construction industry will finally benefit from.
Recommendations for improving our advising of students who are undertaking a
final year research project follow.

1. Give a list of the suitable words for future students for starting their
research questions.
2. Suggest that the students include words which indicate the industry in
which they are working.
3. Recommend that they use about a dozen words, but expect wide variations
 Research directions in Construction Engineering

from this guideline.

4. Let them pose the questions and take ownership of the project.
5. Allow time for nominal feedback.
6. Force a competitive process which encourages “the survival of the fittest”
proposals.

Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks are expressed to the anonymous referees for suggestions for
improvement. Thanks are also expressed to the students of 2006 and 2007 who
prepared the proposals that allowed the data to be collected for this paper.

References
Bausell, R. B., 1986, A practical guide to conducting empirical research, New
York: Harper & Row, p. 12. ISBN 0-06-040542-2
Kennedy, I. G., 1992, Educating Engineers in How to do Research. Africon '92
Proceedings. New York: IEEE. IEEE Catalog No 92CH3215-1. pp. 612-617.
ISBN 0-7803-0835-2
Kennedy, I. G., 2004, A new tool for the lifelong learner: Homological Transfer, 4th
Global Congress on Engineering Education 2004 UICE, Bangkok,Thailand, 6-9
July 2004
Kennedy, I. G., 2008, BUQS3007 Research Method Course Brief and Outline.
Johannesburg, South Africa: School of Construction Economics and Management.
University of the Witwatersrand
Philips, E. M. and Pugh, D. S., 1987, How to Get a PhD. Milton Keynes: Open
University. p. 42. ISBN 0 335 15536 7
Scholar, 2008, Search for “Construction Engineering”. Scholar.google.com, Last
accessed February 19 2008
Vygotsky, L. S., 1978, Mind in society: The development of higher psychological
processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally published 1930)

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