Research Article Critiques

Activity 2

Section 2: Becoming an Expert in Your Topic Area

Doctoral students earn their doctorate by demonstrating expertise in a topic area and by doing original research that contributes to knowledge and theory. These two requirements are stated in their logical order: You must be an expert in an area in order to do original research. You demonstrate expertise by showing that you know the literature, current and historical, in the area and that you are able to join discussions in the area by critically evaluating research and theory and taking reasoned stands on the issues in the area.

As you know, a study cannot be a dissertation study without a thorough literature review. Boote and Beile (2005) wrote:
A substantive, thorough, sophisticated literature review is a precondition for doing substantive, thorough, sophisticated research. “Good” research is good because it advances our collective understanding. To advance our collective understanding, a researcher or scholar needs to understand what has been done before, the strengths and weaknesses of existing studies, and what they might mean. A researcher cannot perform significant research without first understanding the literature in the field.

The activities in this section assist you in developing your skills in critiquing research, discussing issues in your area, identifying a research problem, and writing a literature review.

Required Reading:

Please refer to each Activity for required readings within Activity Resources.

Assignment 2 Research Article Critiques
As you learned in an earlier course, the skills involved in critiquing articles, writing a literature review that supports the existence of a dissertation-worthy research problem, and proposing, designing, and doing research are all related. They have in common: knowledge of research design, validity concepts, and test construction; use of logic in reasoning; and the ability to organize thinking. Reading well, critically, thoughtfully, and with purpose is fundamental to doing a dissertation.

Business Administration scholars must critique and evaluate research reports because truth, such as it is in business administration, is the result of a collective, critical process. You cannot assess the state of knowledge in an area simply by collecting conclusions from research articles. A literature review is not simply a collection of reports of conclusions from research articles, much less, an account of what others have done.

As a novice researcher preparing to make a scientific contribution, you are obligated to critically analyze previous research and reach and defend your own conclusions about what is known and not known in your area.

At this point in the program, you have been implicitly or explicitly introduced to a number of means of analyzing or interrogating research articles. “Interrogating” is perhaps more useful, as it helps you see that you understand an article and evaluate a study by asking questions of it. The questions you ask depend on your purpose in reading an article. A good question to ask yourself before reading an article is: What do I want to learn from reading this article?

Below is a list of approaches to reading and critiquing research articles that you can choose from and mix and match as best fits you and your purposes. For general guidance on how to read academic works, see the Monash University site and the first three sections of Little & Parker (2010).

Approaches to Critiquing Peer-Reviewed Research Articles
1. Meltzoff’s systematic approach (1998/2008, pp. 164-65).

2. Trochim and Donnelly’s (2008) definition of validity– “the best possible approximation of the truth of a given proposition, inference, or conclusion” (p. 14). The definition serves as a simple, but excellent, evaluation tool. Researchers set events in motion and reached a conclusion about the events—is the conclusion true, i.e., warranted? To answer this question, you need:

3. Critical reading and thinking skills. Research articles are in the end, arguments: a collection of propositions or sentences organized to support a conclusion. To evaluate research articles, you need an array of critical thinking skills, such as those discussed and taught here:
Online Resources for Students in Philosophy
The Critical Thinking Community Public Library of Critical Thinking Resources

4. Little & Parker (2010), How to Read a Scientific Paper, Section 4.

5. Creswell’s (2013) suggestions for modeling the variables in a study and the constructs in a theory combined with Trochim’s (2006) neat little picture of the theory and observation levels as they relate to construct validity. Sometimes (maybe all the time!) drawing a picture of the theoretical and observational levels of a study can help you see how the researchers understand their study at the theoretical or conceptual level and how (and how well) they translated constructs into actions and observables and addressed possible confounds and sources of error. The diagram can also simply help you understand how the constructs/variables are related or might be related. Such drawings can also help you to design your own study.

6. Northcentral’s requirements for the structure of a dissertation as outlined in the Dissertation Proposal template. This affords a set of set of valuable questions: What is the problem the study addresses? What is the purpose of the research? Do the research questions serve the purpose of the study and address the problem? Does the design answer the questions? And so forth.

7. Identify plausible threats to validity that a study did not address, using, for example, Trochim (2006) Introduction to Validity and Validity Typology and Validity Threats.

8. Blaxter, Hughes, & Tight (2010). Chapter 4, Reading for Research, “Good Enough Reading”: pp. 113-118.

9. The Step by Step Guides to Critiquing Research – Quantitative and Qualitative

10. Everything you learned in all of your research courses! Your learning sums to having the skills to determine if the design of a research study yielded findings that address a research problem and answers research questions “in a convincing way” (de Vaus, 2001, p. 9).

These approaches to critiquing research are heuristics, guides. They overlap in many ways, which doesn’t matter. What matters is that you pick and choose from among them to have a set of tools that you can use to analyze research articles and think clearly about your research.

Activity Resources
•The Critical Thinking Community Public Library of Critical Thinking Resources
•Little, J. & Parker, R. (2010). Monash University. Language and Online Learning/Reading.
•Step by Step Guide to Critiquing Research – Quantitative and Qualitative
•Trochim, W. (2006). Introduction to validity.
•Validity Typology and Validity Threats.
•Distinguishing Scholarly from Non-Scholarly Periodicals.
•Learn How to Write a Review of Literature.
Main Task: Develop and Apply a Personal Toolkit for Critiquing Research Articles
For this assignment—in which for practice purposes, you will give articles “the whole megillah” and understand and evaluate all of the decisions, assumptions, and arguments the researchers made—you will put together your own complete set of questions to use in interrogating research articles.

Part I
Review the resources above and put together a list of questions and strategies you will use to critically read research articles for your dissertation.

Length: 1-2 pages

Part II
Apply the list of questions and strategies you developed in Part I to two articles describing research that contributes to theory in your topic area. Choose short articles (fewer than 10 pages) if possible. Submit your analysis of both articles in a single brief paper. Send your Instructor the articles or links to them. You may organize the paper simply as answers to your Part I questions. Follow APA style only for the reference list.

Length: 3-5 pages not including title and reference pages

Your paper should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts that are presented in the course and provide new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University’s Academic Integrity Policy.

 

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