Perspectives: Method and methodology in nursing research

I know I am becoming a grumpy old man. I know this because my big teens tell me and also because I shout at the television when the English language is misused, or when captions abuse the English language. It’s not that I don’t understand that language can and should develop. I respect such ideas that Stephen Fry propounds, and the joy of language development. But in coming to the end of my sixth decade on this planet, and fourth decade in nursing, most of which was in academe, there are some areas in which I see erosion of quality and rigour, but which I know are lost and I need to let them go. There is one area, however, that I want to hang onto: the proper use of the word methodology, and the fact that it is different from the use of the word method.

With respect to his love of the English language Stephen Fry is very clear about where he stands with pedants:

Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. (Langage Log, 2016)

There is a very large part of me which is concerned that I am being rude and haughty in the guise of a scholarly paper in the voice of a grumpy old man. As many have said before, insight is one thing, but acting on it is another. But there are so many aspects of the abuse of the English language that I would like to share with you in the confident hope that I will feel better after the rant, whilst still knowing that I have to admit to losing the battle and the war.

The first was lost before it was won, the use of the semi-colon. There must be a group of nursing hermits somewhere who understand how to use this strange beast. They can talk to themselves about its use and retain its integrity by not being exposed to the rest of us. Most of us just avoid it, and for my part I only use it in lists, and that is as far as I would edit or comment on others’ usage.

The next is the split infinitive. I should have realised this battle was lost in the 1960s with the opening sequence to the first Star Trek series – To boldly go where no one has gone before. But I still shout at the TV when under 40s split the infinitive for impact, still comment on student work, and correct their splitting, having to explain what this is because they’ve never been taught it, at school, undergraduate or postgraduate levels. I even comment on senior colleagues’ usage of the split infinitive, and then worry about its impact upon working relationships as a result of making such proofing comments. In recent years, I was saved by the wife of such a senior colleague being an English teacher, and telling him that Steve was right. But I’m sure it isn’t making me friends, and what’s the point?

Then we come to the apostrophe. The use of the apostrophe is so simple, it’s simply a set of rules. Although I will admit a little, that the shopkeeper’s apostrophe can cause a challenge or two. And as a concrete offer out of this paper, I have an electronic handout that explains the use of the apostrophe, so please email me and I will send it to you to save you explaining it all to your students and colleagues. I have a colleague who is now chief executive of a clinical commissioning group. We were lamenting the fact that so few colleagues knew the proper use of the apostrophe, and I told him about my handout. He thought it sounded very useful and I said I would email it to him. The only problem was that he forgot he had asked me to email it to him, so took offence at my sending it to him, along the lines of how dare you send me that handout, I know how to use the apostrophe. Do you see a theme here of losing friends in this paper? On another occasion I was visiting a children’s unit, and recognised three of the nurses as having attended my teaching in the last few years. They were pleased to see me, as I was them, but they immediately covered up their computers. I asked them why they were doing that, and their answer was that they didn’t want to let me see their apostrophes. They weren’t worried about discussing the care of children, but were worried that they had got their apostrophes wrong. Is that what they remembered me for? Was my apostrophe obsession getting in the way of my relationships with students?

And then there’s the use of the word unique. You can’t qualify the word unique, phenomena cannot be really unique, they are only unique, and equally they can’t be rather unique. My family love me telling the TV that the Gen Y reporter has got that one wrong. Did I slip in the word phenomena into this rant? Yes that’s the word that is the plural of the word phenomenon.

Getting closer to academe we come to the word data, which is, of course, a plural word. It is the plural of the word datum. So when used in a sentence it is correctly used by saying that data are plural, and that the word datum is singular. Think about it. And so the result of marking student work, and colleagues’ drafts of papers, leads to students and colleagues saying that they’ve never been told that before. (And on the television, and the radio – I am equitable in my grumpiness – I shout at presenters who fail to know that the plural of the word stadium is stadia, not stadiums.) The fact that I was a product of a private (public) school education where I was exposed to learning Latin from the age of seven to the age of 14 could be blamed. But for my wife and big teens it simply sits in the ‘Dad’s a miserable pedant’ part of their heads. And even my quoting the schoolboy chant of Latin is a language as dead as dead can be, first it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me, won’t change their views on that. (I didn’t do Greek at school, so here I’m not going to write anything about Greek plurals, I’ll leave that to Stephen Fry again.)

Some of you will remember the 1990s television advert from British Telecom, in which Beattie is on the phone to a grandchild, who is telling her that he has passed his pottery and sociology exams. To which she replies – you’ve got an ‘ology’. My memories of the early misuse of the word methodology was in the 1990s with colleagues getting into research, and (my interpretation) building up their credibility by using the longer word, adding the ology. And like Beattie’s comment getting an ology. The other joke was that methodology was a method that had been to university.

Adding an ology is not just in research, and used for aggrandisement. Some medical professionals tend to use long Latin and Greek words to make themselves sound more sophisticated. A case in point is using the word symptomatology when they really mean symptom, or set of symptoms. But the difference here is that there is really no such a word as symptomatology.

The etymology of ‘methodology', refers to ‘method' and ‘ology'. ‘Ology' typically refers to a discipline of study or knowledge. As a result ‘methodology' is considered to be (a combination of ‘ology’ and ‘method’) a study of methods. Methodology ‘refers to the rationale and the philosophical assumptions that underlie any natural, social or human science study, whether articulated or not. Simply put, methodology refers to how each of logic, reality, values and what counts as knowledge inform research’ (McGregor and Murname, 2010: 2).

For the last 15 years I have been asking higher degree students for methodology and methods chapters, or outlines for research proposals. And unless I have been arrogant and haughty and explained to them that unlike other normal beings I use the words properly, I am likely to get a method outline for methodology, or vice versa, or some amalgam of the two. The reason I am a pedant in this regard and will remain so, is that the two words are different, they do not mean the same. It is clearly an ongoing problem, if you look at the many internet entries on various discussion boards, many of them from postgraduate research students.

Methods, in simple terms, is what the researchers actively did in their study. They are the tools and techniques used by researchers. These are myriad in kind, but good examples might be interviews, questionnaires, quality of life measures, surveys or focus groups. Researchers from differing academic disciplines use varying methods. A social researcher might collect data in the form of interviews, focus groups or observations. An agriculture researcher might want to track the positions of animals for their grazing habits; a microbiologist might specific kinds of cell in a specific area; a soil scientist might measure differences in pH in different geographical areas. Methods refer to the processes by which data are collected in the research study. A research publication should have a methods section that outlines these processes (Singh, 2016).

Methodology is the study of how research is done. It is the way we discover about procedures, and the way in which knowledge is gained. It outlines the principles that are the guidance for research processes. A statistics methodology textbook explains the science/statistics of the methods used within and how to use these techniques to the right effect; where and when they are applicable and not applicable. A qualitative methodology makes similar justifications for qualitative research methods. Methodology explains why we use these various methods in their context (Singh, 2016).

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of methodology is

Originally: the branch of knowledge that deals with method generally or with the methods of a particular discipline or field of study; (arch.) a treatise or dissertation on method; (Bot.) †systematic classification (obs. rare). Subsequently also: the study of the direction and implications of empirical research, or of the suitability of the techniques employed in it; (more generally) a method or body of methods used in a particular field of study or activity. (OED, 2016)

In this way the two requests: 1. please tell me about your method and 2. please tell me about your methodology shouldn’t be confused. A specific set of methods, used for a specific purpose, are justified methodologically. Additionally, the word methodology can refer to a system of methods as distinct from the methods themselves. A good example of this usage might be grounded theory, where grounded theory (GT) is both methodology (and divided into schools) as well as a method, where one approach to GT is adopted as the research method as a result of a methodological discussion.

Conclusion

Cook and Fonow (1986) define methodology as ‘the study of methods and not simply the specific techniques themselves'. Without causing confusion when I’ve been trying to do the opposite, although the concepts are now clearly different, methodology and method cannot be regarded in isolation. Method and methodolody are interdependent, for instance, in research proposal development, and in carrying out the best possible research studies. For research to be from one particular thematic area, such as feminism, the methods used must reflect both the feminist philosophy and methodology. It is the epistemology, the methodology and the concepts from which they arose, not the methods themselves, that characterise the research (Campbell and Bunting, 1991; King, 1994).