Research methods at doctoral level

Research as the distinguishing feature

Ask a Level 8 learner what surprised them most and the answer is almost always the research units. The strategy units have recognisable ancestors at Level 7. The research units do not, or not really: a master's dissertation is a different animal from what Level 8 asks for, and the difference is not one of length. This chapter explains what the research component involves, taking the OTHM diploma as the worked example because its research units carry sixty of its 180 credits and are the more fully specified, and noting where the Qualifi diploma's single Research Methods unit differs.

Two units, one arc

In the OTHM diploma, research is taught through two units that form a single arc from design to practice.

Advanced Research Design and Methodologies carries forty credits, making it the largest unit in either programme and, in terms of hours, the equivalent of a substantial first year of doctoral research training. Its purpose is to take you from a problem to a defensible design. You will identify a research problem in your own field, review the literature around it critically, take a position on the philosophy of knowledge that underlies your approach, choose and justify a methodology and specific methods, and address the ethical dimensions of the study you propose. The assessed output is, in effect, a full research proposal of the kind a doctoral candidate would submit for approval.

Developing Research Capability carries twenty credits and moves from design to execution on a bounded scale. You will collect or analyse data, apply the methods you designed, deal with what goes wrong, reflect on the process, and write it up with attention to the limits of what you found. It is not a thesis and is not examined as one. Its function is to demonstrate that you can do the thing you designed, which is a different competence from designing it.

The Qualifi diploma has a single unit, Research Methods, which covers the ground of the first of these at smaller scale. It produces a proposal rather than a demonstrated study, and the diploma's centre of gravity lies in the strategy units instead. If research is your reason for studying at Level 8, that difference should decide your choice.

How the standard differs from a master's

At master's level a dissertation demonstrates that you can carry out a bounded piece of research competently, using established methods, and report it clearly. The literature review shows that you have read widely and can summarise; the methodology chapter shows that you have chosen a recognised approach and applied it; the findings are expected to be sound rather than new.

At Level 8 every one of those expectations shifts upward. The literature review is expected to be critical rather than descriptive: to identify where the field disagrees with itself, where its assumptions are unexamined, and where your question sits in relation to those gaps. The methodology is expected to be argued for from first principles, with the philosophical position made explicit and defended against alternatives rather than adopted because it is common. The contribution is expected to be defensibly new to your context, which does not mean a discovery, but does mean something that a knowledgeable reader in your field would not already know. And the whole is expected to hold together as an argument, not a sequence of chapters.

Learners who arrive from a good master's usually find that the reading is manageable and the writing is not. The habits that earned distinctions at Level 7, thoroughness, balance, coverage, are necessary but no longer sufficient. What is added is judgement: the willingness to say that a widely used model does not fit, that a body of evidence is weaker than its reputation, that your own position has costs. That is the doctoral disposition, and the research units exist to develop it.

The philosophical choices

Most senior managers have never been asked what they think knowledge is, and are mildly alarmed to discover that the research design unit requires an answer. It does, and for a practical reason: the methods you choose depend on it.

If you hold that there is an organisational reality that exists independently of how people perceive it, and that good research measures it, you will lean towards survey instruments, quantitative analysis and the testing of hypotheses. If you hold that organisational reality is constructed through the meanings people give to events, you will lean towards interviews, observation and the interpretation of accounts. If you hold, as many practitioner-researchers do, that the useful question is what works in this context and why, you will find yourself in a pragmatic or realist tradition that mixes methods and treats theory as a tool. None of these is correct; each has a literature, a set of strengths and a set of blind spots. What the unit requires is that you know which one you are working in, can say why, and can anticipate what a critic from another tradition would say about your design.

Learners we have spoken to after the first term report that LSPM's tutors spend more seminar time on this than on any other topic, because it is where learners most often feel out of their depth and where the shift to doctoral thinking most visibly happens.

The discipline of narrowing

The commonest difficulty in the research units is not intellectual but practical. Senior leaders arrive with questions the size of their organisation: how should we transform our culture, why does our strategy keep failing in execution, what will our sector look like in ten years. Every one of those is a good question and none of them can be researched in a bounded unit by one person with a day job.

The work of the first months is narrowing. A question about transforming culture becomes a question about how middle managers in one division interpreted a specific change programme. A question about strategy execution becomes a question about the decision process in one leadership team over one planning cycle. The narrowing feels like a loss and is in fact the point: a question small enough to answer properly teaches you more than a question large enough to matter but impossible to close. Your tutor's job in this period is to keep asking "and how would you know?" until the answer is a method.

Ethics inside your own organisation

Researching an organisation in which you hold authority raises problems that a conventional research ethics course does not fully cover, and both awarding bodies expect them to be addressed. Can a subordinate freely decline to be interviewed by a director? Can findings that reflect badly on colleagues be reported honestly? Who owns the data, and what happens to it if you leave? Is it possible to be both the researcher and a participant in the events you study?

There are answers to all of these, and the literature on insider research is rich, but the answers have to be worked out for your case and written into your design. Learners sometimes find that the ethical analysis changes the study: an interview design becomes a documentary analysis, or a study of one's own team becomes a study of a parallel team elsewhere. That is the process working as intended.

What you will hold at the end

If you complete the OTHM research units you will have a research proposal developed under supervision over many months and assessed at Level 8, a report on a bounded study you actually carried out, and a clear understanding of the philosophical and methodological choices behind both. You will not have a thesis, and you should be careful not to describe the work as one. But you will have exactly what a doctoral admissions tutor most wants to see in an applicant: evidence that you can frame a question, design a study, and sustain critical writing at the standard the doctorate will require.

The next chapter explains how that work, and the rest of the diploma, is assessed.