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Not every research should look like when Bill Gates invented Windows or even when Oppenheimer invented atomic bomb. Social research is simply about evaluating current social phenomena based on past social theories. It can be either general or special event, as long as there is a human inside.
Research can be classified as basic research (for academicians) or applied research (for practitioners). Both of them usually have these components:
- Identifying phenomena.
- Proposing questions.
- Reviewing literatures.
- Designing research:
- Unit of analysis
- Measurement
- Sampling
- Analysis
- Collecting data.
- Analyzing data.
- Interpreting data.
- Reporting research.
According to Neuman (2013), some sources of information that we usually use are:
1. Personal experience and common sense:
We may think psychology has no math before. But, now we found that quantitative analyses in social research were heavily influenced by psychologists.
2. Experts and authorities:
We may respect to our professors, like they inherit KungFu to us. But, there is a possibility that they decide based on their interests in other situations.
3. Popular and media messages:
Media are not entirely misleading, but they focus more on engagement compared to fact. They focus on how to make people surprised without entire explanation.
4. Ideological beliefs and values:
We may have our own beliefs and values, but these are personal. We cannot argue with these things universally, to prevent excuses on glorifying ones to others.
We do research because social research produces "real science", which are one of the types of sciences based on Neuman (2013):
1. Junk science:
Junk science comes from media that want to attack certain scientific researches based on their agenda. It is like a good satisfaction survey results of public health service, while the sample only consists of privileged respondents.
2. Pseudoscience:
Pseudoscience comes from experts in unrelated fields. It is like talking about artificial intelligence will replace our boba tea while they have no idea about programming at all.
3. Real science:
Real science comes from scientific community. In the social research context, real science is a collective contribution of how we look the world. It is based on the evaluation of the reality of social events.
I decided long ago
Never to walk in anyone's shadows
If I fail, if I succeed
At least I'll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can't take away my dignity(Linda Creed)
As Neuman (2013) stated in his book, we're living in a world where we have the rights to think independently. Especially in the internet era, social media engagement may biases our views on a certain thing.
As a result, everyone can be a social researcher. The idea is being a person that evaluates social phenomena based on scientific community's standards.
1. Depend on commercial software. (Students and professors)
Commercial software indicates exclusivity, which means some people cannot access it. Even worse, piracy threats academic integrity as a result of this.
2. Maximum commands, minimum understandings. (Students)
Software that intentionally defines "power users", creates a knowledge gap. For researchers, it is like exploring how to explore, but technically not theoretically.
3. We have no idea about anything that we haven't done. (Students)
We haven't done research in the previous semesters, yet we have to finish it just in a few months. We don't want to pay an extra tuition.
4. It is what it is, we have to graduate on time. (Students)
We don't have enough time to read a whole book. We utilize non-credible sources like YouTube to learn things related to research.
5. We do what our seniors did. (Students)
To reduce risk, we just imitate our seniors' researches. It can be the writing structure or even the research topic.
6. We have multiple students to be supervised. (Professors)
We supervise multiple students with different researches, meaning that we can't spend much time on guiding them. They have to do self-exploration on the major part of their research.
7. We have knowledge limitations on statistics. (Professors)
Quantitative research depends on statistics, which is another discipline. To understand the philosophy of statistical methods, statisticians are indeed better than us social researchers.
Kirana is a project that consists of two products:
- Kirana: App that assists social researchers in exploring and analyzing theories.
- kirana.fyi: Web that explains concisely about a whole of social research.
We are motivated to build this project because:
- It simplifies discussion between students and professors.
- It helps academicians and practitioners exchange knowledges.
- It is built on top of open source softwares and open access books.
- It is advised by experts from multiple fields (social, statistics, and IT).
- It ignites the product-based paradigm of political actions in Indonesia.