00:00: There is often an assumption that there’s some kind of linearity to the process of doing research. When we start a research project, we are asked to hypothesise our research findings, which are expected to be tested and validated through the process of data collection and analysis. In practice, the different steps of research, particularly when doing social science research, cannot be as easily delineated, and the process often looks more like an experimental mess.
00:37: Rather than trying to desperately stick to what we want the research to look like, it’s sometimes okay to embrace the “chaos” of research, as this is sometimes how we might come up with more interesting answers to the questions that we started out with. Or, better, we might find ourselves asking new questions that we had not even thought of.
01:01: Some people call this type of approach to doing research grounded theory research. This is an approach which seeks to generate theory from research grounded in data, rather than deducing testable hypotheses from existing theories. Theory development then does not come off the shelf, but it’s grounded in the data from your research participants. Grounded theory is not a less rigorous approach to doing research.
01:30: In fact, it involves a systematic and rigorous process of research design, guided by theoretical sampling, coding, and the categorisation of large bodies of data in order to generate new theory. But there are other ways of doing more inductive types of research, as opposed to deductive research. In my own early research on housing development in postwar Angola, I found that most of the existing literature in political science, on the workings and nature of the African state, were not very useful to explaining what I was seeing in the state’s role in housing development.
02:13: Angola, very similar to Nigeria, is a large oil-producing country. And there was this idea that you have this elite of big men that use the rents from oil production essentially just to enrich themselves, and that there’s this parallel state where these rents are circulating that exists outside of the formal state that is essentially a kind of shell.
02:40: The state, from this perspective, is a rentier state, a shadow state, a failed state. However, I did not find these existing theories to be very helpful for understanding what I saw as the developmental aspects of large-scale housing projects in a country marked by a huge housing deficit, or the ways in which housing projects were actually being governed on a day-to-day basis.
03:07: So, I realised I needed a new kind of theory that could provide me with different concepts and questions to shine a spotlight on the kind of things that I was interested in understanding. This led me to looking at some of the literature on the developmental state that has been developed in the context of East Asia.
03:29: In this literature, the state actually plays a very central role in guiding economic growth and development. I also started looking at political settlement theory, which seeks to explain how and why elites see value in the distribution of rents in a political system. In addition, I started reading literature about the anthropology of the state and the state bureaucracy in order to explain the workings of the everyday state and the role of state officials in the rollout of state housing programs on the ground.
04:09: So, what this shows is that theory is a process. Although it’s very useful to choose a particular theory or theoretical framework upfront, it’s also very important to leave a little bit of space to revisit that initial theory that you chose in light of some of the findings that may emerge throughout your research process.
04:32: Research does not always reflect a diagram where you go neatly from step A to B to C. In practice, the process of research may be messy and more complex. You may find yourself going back and forth between the steps, or you may need to come up with new steps altogether. It’s exactly in that messiness that new research questions and findings can emerge. In taking this kind of approach to your research, it’s important to reflect on this process.
05:04: And, theory always remains central. You need to be able to explain in your work why you made certain choices and why one particular theory was not completely adequate and why you then chose to bring other ones or several “buckets” of literature to answer your research questions.
05:24: So, while you can learn and lean into the messiness of the research process, you always need to do so in a way that is reflective – by describing how you started out doing your research, what questions you had, what you were expecting to find, and how you got to where you ended up.