Understanding research

If you want to get involved in research I think, firstly, you have to be very clear about why you want to be involved, it’s something around being clear what motivates you. It’s very much a long-term journey so it’s not something that can be rushed and I think you have to get used to the timescales being very different from the timescales that most accountants are used to in the commercial world. And if they try to do things in the timescales they’re used to in the commercial world, yes they can get an output. But it’s probably not going to be of particularly good quality from an academic perspective because it won’t have the depth and the rigour there that you need to develop in the academic world.

With research, you have to be ready to cope with the fact that it’s messy and it goes forwards and backwards and you twist it around. And, then, you think, actually I could look at this from a whole new perspective or with a new lens. And that there’s no right answer, it’s grey. There will always be people who think you can do it differently. Because you can. And just accepting that can be quite a challenge for people. Particularly coming from an accounting background. Because of the way that, I suppose, accounting as a discipline and, particularly professional training, creates, perhaps inaccurately at times, that feeling there are right and wrong answers whereas in research there aren’t right and wrong answers. There might be a correct way to run a statistical test. But that, in the greater scheme of things, is a very minor thing in your research. Learning to accept and embrace that is probably the thing that helps make a step change in your journey as a researcher.

If someone was coming from accountancy to my University, they would probably be coming on a teaching and scholarship contract, as most of our qualified Accountants have done. I would say to them that it is really good to get involved in research, but to be careful, it’s a massive area, there’s lots of strange language like ethnography, phenomenology, where you’ll just say ‘what on earth is that?’ And it’s easy to start questioning yourself and to lose confidence. And I would say, start with things like dissertations. You may actually be asked to be the Dissertation Supervisor, and it’ll be years since you’ve written a dissertation if you have. You’re starting from a very basic position of no knowledge of research some times. And so I’d say to somebody new it’s valuable but it’s huge. So treat it carefully, baby steps.

I think there’s more I could learn about research. There seems to be just this way of doing things that is so different to the way I choose to do things, but you have to follow those rules because those are the rules of the club… and it does feel like it’s quite a club with people that make the rules and impose them. And I’m not saying they’re right or wrong, but I think I’d need to do quite a lot of work on knowing what the rules are and complying with the rules and being acceptable to the research community. I think that anyone that goes into academia that’s teaching-intensive, there should be more training or whatever… Even if they’re not going to be research-active, it still would be really advantageous just to know more. Because I think the more you understand something, the more you embrace it sometimes.

Research methods training for staff who are joining Higher Education who are not on a post-Doc or a PhD track who are joining like I did is more problematic. I feel like if there is a group [of qualified accountants] that’s getting bigger, that’s coming in from this other professional background, then that sort of training is going to be increasingly important in terms of that group’s needs in order to make them as productive or as fruitful as possible. I think if your first experiences with research are very tough that might be quite off-putting. I’m in a way lucky that my first experiences were very positive. And so sometimes when it has been tough, I’ve had a bit of balance in that I’ve had some very positive experiences. But if my first experiences had been very, very tough it might have put me off completely. Because I think it could be quite fragile if you’re coming in from a completely different background. And I think this does need surfacing if we are to bring this group into the sector in a more meaningful way.

I think more support on how to research is needed. Just the basics really would be very beneficial.

Apart from lacking the time or resources [to get involved in research] I wouldn’t know where even to start.

You actually have to give yourself space for a good period of time to just read and get involved. And, don’t be trying from the beginning as you’re reading, saying, what will I do? You just have to give yourself time to immerse yourself first and merely exclude all the areas that you don’t want to look at. Because I think you’re going to need interest, real intrinsic interest in what you’re doing to sustain you when it gets bumpy. Because it’ll inevitably get bumpy.

I got into the habit of reading journal articles during the Masters. In the first year or two of my PhD I just read lots and lots of academic articles. It was a bit of a scattergun approach to begin with but it gradually became more focused.

So I suppose as a new Researcher, you have an assumption and a fear that you come up with a bright, shiny idea. And you think, this is great, this is something new that no one has ever looked at. And then of course you think, in seconds, well of course, people have been researching for years, there’s a very good chance that someone has come up with this. So how do I effectively search the database, how do I look at what’s been done before to make sure that I’m not just replicating something that a more seasoned Researcher would look at and yawn and say, ‘yes yes, come up with something new that someone else hasn’t looked at’. So it’s the skill set to effectively interrogate the data that’s out there to find what’s relevant to what I’m looking at.

In doing my research, I love getting out and meeting people. I don’t like the transcriptions and things like that. But that’s part and parcel of the role, I suppose. But it’s when you need to go back to the literature says this, and the literature is doing this. And I know it is important. And I suppose it’s just my background but when people are making decisions in business, they don’t go, well, let’s see what the literature said about this. You just get on and you do it. And you learn from this. And you learn from your experiences. And I need to make that paradigm shift, I think, in order to fully believe that I am an academic.

Most of the stuff I read from accounting research is just not written in a way that I feel comfortable with, so I think [if I were to get involved in research] I’d have to do quite a lot of work on my vocabulary and my language and my style of writing. I write very concisely, in a very clear business style, while most academic writing that I’ve come across is just not written that way.

The writing that I’ve done has very much been executive reports, board papers, case studies or academic teaching rather than research, and I think I will have to recognise that I have to change my writing style. So that’s something that I’m aware of and have an open mind about. I’m finding it’s an iterative process, and one of the things I’ve quite quickly become used to is writing something, either because my Supervisor asked me to write an introduction or I need to do an application for a bursary or something like that. And I’ll come back to it about a month later and I’ll think, ‘what rubbish that is’ because I’ve moved on and found out new things. And I’m trying to be easier on myself, but I wouldn’t write it that way again, I’d change it each time.

Trying to write is, I think, one of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen most of all with Accountants coming from practice or industry into academia. Or, write in an academic way. Certainly to me, you get more familiar with trying to write by reading a lot. That’s why, again, the reading matters. If you’ve read quite widely you see how things are put together. Rather than just seeing reading as extracting things.

I think style is quite difficult. If you are used to writing normal business reports or writing for a corporate audience, the style is very, very different. And you will be told by academics that you can’t write if you use that style. And that’s quite difficult to shift yourself into. And some of that comes from reading lots and lots and lots. And some of it comes from identifying exemplars who can help and advise. And also doing further studies, for example, a PhD. I think the discipline of producing the extended piece of work in the style that is required is helpful. It may not be the fastest route. But then taking from that big set of data and ideas, to try to distil it into two or three, maybe, shorter papers or, I suppose, the best of it into those papers is important.

I could already write a business report but to write an academic report I find very challenging. And there’s not much help at the University for that.

The one thing that I have found useful, actually, in terms of trying to get a feel for what makes a quality paper is working as a reviewer for a peer-reviewed journal. At first sight, it seemed a little bit odd. But actually with the benefit of hindsight, it’s a very good way round of doing it because I’ve ended up seeing lots of different papers with lots of different stages. So that’s, probably more than anything else, given me an insight into the process of writing a paper for a journal.

I struggled with understanding what a conceptual framework was. I look back now and I’ve got colleagues that I’m advising and even some of them struggle now; they don’t really understand what is meant by this conceptual theory. And also the difference between methods and methodology, some of the things like that.

I’m quickly beginning to realise that the knowledge I need as a Researcher is quite different from the knowledge and skills that I’ve used as a Teacher and organiser of the programme. They are forming at the moment, I would say. I need to understand research techniques and theory. One of the first things that came across was, ‘well, what’s your theory?’, and I realised that I needed to find a theory. And this whole concept was quite new to me. And the whole concept of adding to theory as well has been quite difficult. So it’s quite awe-inspiring to think, well actually, I’m supposed to know all the body of knowledge that’s out there or at least find that out. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, add to it as well. So that’s quite intimidating to have that challenge.

Probably one of the biggest things that I would see now, when I’m trying to talk to or help mentor people who are at an earlier stage, is getting used to the way that academic researchers frame research questions. Or, what is the issue? It’s not just that you’re trying to find an answer. You’re framing it within a literature where you would ask it in certain ways. So that sort of understanding around methodology, in the wider sense, is what you develop over time. I think there can be a tendency, particularly for people who’ve been in practice for a while or in industry, they want it just to be like a project that’s linear and has milestones and tick things off. They also, nearly from day one, open up a big document called their thesis. So, they’re always in theory in their own minds filling in bits of their thesis. I go, ‘But your thesis will be the bit at the end’. But they are obsessed. They have their table of contents flying along. And they think, but I’ve got this done and I’ve got that done, rather than standing back from it. They break it down into such piecemeal bits, that the essence of it, the continuity, the standing back and the critique. It’s hard to convey to them that it’s not just a sum of parts.

I have enough of a grasp of it to be able to advise my masters’ students as to what type of research they're doing. And what type of approach they have. But I would certainly need to know much more about that, because if I ever hope to publish, or if I ever hope to do a PhD, I would have to have done that, and done it to a considerably better quality than my masters’ students, who're doing it at the moment.

I’ve picked up some of the skills because I’ve supervised dissertations and things like that. So I’ve picked up some of the hard skills like Harvard referencing and research methodology and literature reviews and all of those things. I think there’s a whole piece around analysis that I’m missing. I think my statistical, my quants analysis, is just nowhere near strong enough. I also think that if I did go and do research, there’s a bit of a language I need to learn.

I’ve started to get more involved in pedagogical research and I find it very difficult. I feel like I don’t have enough skills in terms of designing questionnaires and surveys even, and this kind of interview. I feel like I would need help with designing good questions to generate data for my research.

Research scared me because I have a big gap in that I don’t have the advanced statistics that I would really need if I was going to do the very data driven research that a lot of my colleagues are doing. So that is a gap and filling that gap at this stage I think would be quite difficult, there’s a lot I’ve missed out on.

I think without a deeper understanding of, I'm going to call it, the paradigm of research, I think your research is not going to have any impact, in the sense that for it to be regarded as rigorous research you need to convince whoever the reader is that what you've done, you've done properly. You need to structure your paper or your research in such a way that you can convince your peers that it's been rigorous enough. Before the [research methods and methodology] course, I really didn't think about theoretical frameworks. I mean it wasn't foreign to us. It's not that we haven't heard about them, but we just didn't apply then. And since then, I actually am starting to really enjoy it. So with my own studies, I use actor-network theory, and institutional theory, and so I think you tend to start loving them. I mean that. It’s strange words that I'm using, but that's the stuff that I wouldn't have used a year ago. So that's what I think really got me going. It really gave me a push in the right direction. So I think that's on the knowledge side.

My PhD has some taught modules where they teach you particularly on research methods. So, for me, that was a really good way to get that learning in. And to get up to speed. And from there, I built on that in my research methods for my PhD. So, that was quite a good exercise. It didn’t feel like it though when I was writing the assessment and trying to manage my lecturing. But I think it’s a good thing to do. To have that sort of discipline of those taught modules.