This post follows on from last week’s post about a couple of -ologies I have found a little (and a lot) intimidating over the course of my PhD. These -ologies are often stumbling blocks for me, and for other students I know. It’s almost as if your brain hears them and immediately puts its fingers in its ears and starts saying ‘la la la’ really loudly until you stop asking it to think about these concepts. I suggested last week finding ways to best these -ologies by finding examples and stories to explain them in the context of your own research, or in the context of more familiar ideas. This week I have two more -ologies I have done this with. The first is a very familiar one – Methodology – and the second is my own one – Theoryology. I’ll start with the made-up one.

When I started my PhD in 2010, I had no idea what a conceptual or theoretical framework was. My MA research project was a smaller one – 25000 words – and my supervisor was in Canada while I was in South Africa writing it and she was not a lover of email or sustained feedback, so I did not get a great deal of help with the thinking. I did alright in the end, but it was not a very conscious writing process. I felt like I was simply following her basic instructions to get it done rather than crafting my own project. So, starting the PhD was properly scary because I had never done a research project like this, and I was intimidated and very unsure of myself. And, on top of that I had to start with theory.

Now, I like theory, and I am pretty good at putting pieces of a puzzle together to create a nice, coherent whole. So, I write really good literature reviews. But a theoretical framework is much more than a literature review. It’s just that: a framework; a holding structure; something that makes you study intelligible to readers and that guides the study as it progresses. A literature review is really more of a guide to all the other research you are drawing on to make sense of what your study is about, what it thinks it can contribute to the field, and where it is located in the field. Starting out, my supervisor talked more about me reading my way into finding a framework, rather than a literature review. I felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of reading I needed to do, and battled to find the time but more than that the headpsace to do all the reading and thinking. I read a lot and made a mountain of notes, mostly copied quotes from these texts, but at the end of the year I had no framework. I had a great draft of a literature review, but nothing that could really shape and guide my study. I had no Theoryology – no strategy to guide the selection and coherent melding of theoretical tools into a framework capable of shaping and guiding a research study.

I took a break for a while in 2011, and when I started reading again I came to the literature trying to look for something different – trying to find this sort of strategy. I found my way to social and critical realism, and these two fields began to give me what I was looking for – theoryology. I could slowly begin to see the shape of my project, and the scope of the questions I could ask and answer. I think the key difference was that I started to see the theory I was reading as more than just ideas; I started to see tools: tools that could become analytical and a lens with which to look for and look at data; tools that could do different things in different parts of my study. There was other theory that I used as well to build the framework for my study – substantive theory that was more ideas than tools. You need both, but I learned that different kinds of theories can do different things. Some have greater explanatory and conceptual power than others, and you need to find the overarching conceptual or theoretical framework – the theoryology – as well as the substantive theory that helps you to understand and explain parts of your study and that helps you to locate your study in relation to other relevant research.

The other -ology I took a while to get a handle on was Methodology. I took ages to get going on this chapter, mostly because I had no idea what I was really doing with it. What exactly is a ‘methodology’? I did some reading, but what I found was a lot of stuff on methods, which is not a methodology. For ages, though, I thought it was. I think lots of researchers, especially less experienced ones, might use these terms to mean the same thing. I did initially, but that was because I did not see the crucial difference. A methodology is another kind of strategy, linked to your theoryology. You use both to give a more abstract picture of your study – one at a remove from the nitty gritty of the data and the details. The bigger picture stuff, if you like. So, if the theoryology is the framework or holding structure for your study, then the methodology is the strategy you employ for putting the study into action. What data will you collect? Why will you collect this data and not other kinds of data? What will you do with this data once you have it? How will you look at it, question it, analyse it? How will this data connect to the theory and the literature? These are some critical methodological questions. When you get out into the field, and interview, survey, observe, and then come home again and transcribe, draw, sift etc – these are your methods shaped into a coherent form by your methodology – your overall strategy – and held in place further by your theoryology or the theoretical (and eventually analytical) framework you will use to guide your whole study to its conclusions.

These don’t seem like such scary -ologies now, but I think they are potentially intimidating and also confusing for many scholars. Again, finding ways to make them make sense to you and to your study is the best way to gain control over them and out them to work for you.