Standard Issue Methods

The methods section is perhaps the most conventional part of a standard research paper in the social sciences. There is a certain amount of room for creative syntheses of theory, and often a great deal of freedom in how the results themselves are presented. But the methods you use, and they way you talk about them, have to make your reader trust you. After all, you are setting the reader up for an artful disappointment. It is the methods section that ensures that the reader will actually feel that disappointment rather than merely doubt your results.

The most important thing, however, is that you tell the reader the truth about what you did. This section must accurately describe how you gathered the data on which you base your conclusions. How many interviews did you do? Over how long a period did you do onsite observation? How many surveys did you send out? How did you select your subjects and informants? How big was the data set you drew from industry databases?

But you must also show an awareness of the standard methodologies in your field. Though the distinction is sometimes blurred, method is what you did, methodology is the account of why it is the right thing to do. The standards here are often expressed by others in classic papers or handbooks. In the fields I normally work with, for example, if you're doing a case study you are likely to cite Kathleen Eisenhardt's paper "Building Theories from Case Study Research" (AMR, 1989) and, just as likely, Robert Yin's widely read handbook, Case Study Research (Sage, 2009). You do not have to agree with everything they say, and both approaches themselves have a history of reception, i.e., their views have been adapted and modified in particular studies that may look more like your own. The point is merely that in order to be taken seriously as a "case study", your paper must acknowledge precisely the tradition of case-study research that is informed and guided by such "standard" statements (accounts) of method.

The good news is that once you have shown that you are an intelligent reader of the methodologies that are available in your field, your reader is likely to trust even your intelligent breaches of those methods. In one sense, it is true what Paul Feyerabend said many years ago in Against Method: "The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes" (p. 7). But once you've done "whatever" it takes to reach your conclusions, you must make a compelling case for what you've done. And here it is always a good idea to gesture respectfully at the conventional wisdom that constitutes your field of research.