Research is refining an idea

九月 29, 2025

As a matter of fact, research as an inquiring drive towards understanding given phenomena is in many instances articulated as a process of adjusting and revising one's preliminary idea. As a researcher puts it:

'I get an idea [...] of how I might analyze something against the backdrop of the knowledge I have of the subject, um, and then I explore it in order to see if it's tenable. But not only if it's tenable, because it is a vague hypothesis, you know ... but also to flesh out the details in order to ... get smarter myself.'

Inquiry-based reading -- Towards a conception of reading as a research method

SAGE Publications; SAGE Publications Inc. (ISSN 1474-0222), Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, #1, 19, pages 58-75, 2018 feb 27

Katan, Lina; Andreas Baarts, Charlotte