Re-search? Pardon my French
My initial view was that it was because the process somewhere involved searching anew. Some clever person had, before us, come up with something clever – and we, in our quest for cleverness, were investigating it afresh in the hope of:
- proving the said clever person wrong
- scrounging for something the said clever person had overlooked so we could present it as our own
- adapting the said clever person's work to suit new demands
That all sounded very nice and strong and I was quite pleased with the reasoning for some time. Especially since dictionaries broke the word down as re + search, the former a prefix found in loanwords from Latin meaning 'again' and the latter meaning, well, 'search'.
Trouble was, did this not imply research was re search? Did it not suggest everything we do today is treading the trodden path, ergo, unoriginal?
Surely, there's enough original work?
Surely, there are searches going on?
While Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and the ever-dependable Wikipedia defined research as what we commonly take it to mean ("a course of critical or scientific inquiry", "careful or diligent search", "active, diligent, and systematic process of inquiry aimed at discovering, interpreting, and revising facts", in that order), they were content to leave where the re bit fit in unexplained. So I turned to the net, and here are three academic definitions, shamelessly lifted from Introduction to Social Work Research, a presentation by Dr Osei Dwarka of the University of Illinois:
- ...careful and systematic study in some field of knowledge, undertaken to establish facts or principles (Grinnell, 1997)
- ...a systematic way of asking questions (Drew, 1980)
- ...the scientific examination (reexamination) of emphirical data collected by someone first hand, concerning the social and psychological forces operating in a situation (Monette et al, 1994).
Um, interesting. But not particularly illiminating in this instance – for, none of the definitions takes us any closer to the elusive re. This is when I came across Klaus Krippendorff's definition, in Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology (2004, p81): ...a repeated search within data for apparent patterns.
Certainly more insightful, it offers an explanation for the prefix. But it also makes me ask why. Why is it a repeated search? Why is it not just a search?
A quick look at etymology (courtesy Oxford Online, Merriam-Webster), and I get the impression – and mind, this is only the impression of someone unschooled in matters such – that it was first used by the French to probably mean what it actually means: search afresh. The Middle French word recherché, which, Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia assure me fathered our modern-day research is a compound of our old pal re and cherché (French for ‘search’, I am told). And the French, in light of the existence of an already cute word for search would not have started calling it recherché just for the heck of it. So in all likelihood, it had popped out, complete with the prefix, to mean what it means literally.
Once in vogue – I am hypothesizing here, of course – it crossed the English channel without much ado. Perhaps it was initially used in English too to mean what it means (spelt differently though, by the look of it: as first researche and later reserch). Perhaps not. What is certain is that through the 15, 16 and 1700s, the word began to acquire the meaning 'search' and 'search thoroughly'.
Thus, we had – oh, what would I have done without Oxford Online? – quotes such as I carefully avoided the habitation ... lest it should ... furnish a clue to the researches of my pursuers and Our most profound researches are frequently nothing better than guessing at the causes of the phenomena. And by the time Jane Eyre came along with Currer Bell and Charlotte Bronte on her arm in 1847, the re had become just an appendage: She had left Thornfield Hall in the night; every research after her course had been vain.
We seem to have forgotten about that poor prefix today; most often, the word is used to mean a search for something specific.
Question now is, are people like moi – pardon my French – re-searchers?
Or are we plain searchers?
PS: Would be interesting to hear how Professor Barry Richards tackles this in his talk on October 16, What's research and why we do it. Venue, time details, to appear on this page shortly.
posted by Chindu at 11:26 am
6 Comments:
One of the meanings of "rechercher" in French is to try do discover something (essayer de découvrir quelque chose). Most probably, the word passed into English with the Normans. I do not think it makes sense to divide the word into re and chercher in this meaning.
I think Krippendorf's "repeated search for patterns" makes sense in a grounded theory / experiential / inductive kind of way. You keep repeating a search (which you can refine during the process) so as to end up with a pattern, which (pattern) is then generalisable to a broader population.
I.e. a conduct repeated searches in the behaviour of a community's members by searching the attitudes of one after the other until I end up with a pattern that is applicable to all participants, and which I can then generalise to the entire population of the community.
not sure if this makes sense?
Interesting that (re)search is seen a process or activity. Could it also be a state of mind or way of thinking - a willingness to change or be changed by new information and experience. The process of doing research should make a qualitative difference to the intellectual capacity of the researcher. Isn't that why Universities like PhD's?
Where does one begin? -- We are locked into historically predetermined structures therefore research is determined by the zeitgeist. For all those fancy neologisms you can induct & deduct my ass for all I care. Hasn't anyone read Kuhn? Research is culturally, historically, socially and economically determined. What you call research will change in another generation. Why do we do what we do – because we seek acceptance externally by way of justifying our own inadequacies! Finally what about the linguistic turn? Come on read Lyotard ‘Just Gaming’!
Oleg: Thanks for your comment. Wondering: does chercher also mean the same thing? If so, I am curious about why they chose to add the 're' to it -- do you think they did it for the purpose I argue they did and then it sort of got stuck? (Checked out your blog -- interesting writing on an interesting topic.)
Roman: What you say does make sense, and personally I quite like Krippendorf's definition. But let me play the devil's advocate and offer a counter to that:
We could argue that we are not repeating a search but continuing one when we look for patterns. The search is for a pattern, or patterns, and till we find that, we are at it.
Also, if you look at research (or what we know of as research today), the search for pattern is only part of it. Before we can find patterns, we collect data to scrutinise... and once we find the patterns we make sense out of it, or try to... in that sense, the definition falls a bit short, I think. Or am I, like one of my students accused me last year, being "too pedantic"!?
Anonymous 1 (aka Matt Holland, too lazy to sign in!): Interesting view, quite philosophical as well! Never thought along those lines really, but, yes, it does imply that. Not sure that's the sole reason why universities like PhDs, though... always thought it was because it took up the research rating! :-)
Anonymous 2: I think I need to get my hand on Gaming Theory! Also, acceptance, justify our inadequacies... is that the only reason for research? Careful, I think there are quite a few people around who research for the sake of research -- out of pure passion for their subjects!
Interesting that Thomas Kuhn is mentioned in this discussion. As I understood his argueement is was that there is no inevitability in the progress of (scientific) research, simply that the commonly accepted paradigms are challenged and when they become unsustainable in the light of evidence the paradigms shift to accommodate new ideas - the 'paradigm shift'. This still suggests that in science anyway the effect of research is incremental but not as straight forward, logical and certain as we believed before Kuhn.
Not so clear in the social sciences and humanities, however, but if you shed the idea of social being a science the effect of research is to increase the number of experts and the volume of knowledge with which social (scientists) and humanities scholars can construct ideas and arguments although the process might be iterative or circular.
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