Thursday, January 12, 2012

Reading and Appreciating Secondary Literature

An important task in research is reading secondary literature – literature that concerns or discusses the primary data. Secondary literature comes in many forms. It can come in the form of a published essay anthology of essays. It can come in the form of a commentary, an abstract, an unpublished dissertation, or a journal article. Reading secondary literature can be a difficult and daunting task. I would suggest that the task of reading a journal article can be made easier, if one knows how to recognize the purpose of an article.

How can one identify the purpose of a well-researched article? First, one must recognize that the task of research is basically the systematic pursuit of a worthy question. A worthy question is a clear question that seeks to connect to some unknown aspect of knowledge in order to gain a deeper understanding of what is not yet known. In other words, a worthy question seeks to understand some part of something in order to understand the whole of something. For example, a zoologist me posit an inquiry into the mating habits of African lions in order to understand something about cats in general. What makes a research question worth the is the fact that it is not just a personal question. It's not just a question that seeks to inform or enlighten a single individual, but it's a question that helps clarify an understanding that is beneficial for a group of individuals or a large class of people, or perhaps even humanity in general. In other words, research questions have a public and representational dimension to them.

Second, one must understand the various purposes of research projects. Generally speaking, there are three kinds of research projects that can be conducted: theoretical, applied, and practical. Theoretical projects aimed at understanding the world as it exists. This means these projects aim at describing or defining the world as it exists in some small way. By this definition, our zoologist is someone who is conducting a theoretical project – is attempting to describe the mating habits of African lions as they exist in the real world. Applied research projects aim at developing a principal or set of principles that can be used to achieve some practical objective. Or better stated, these are research project that aim at articulating universally true principles as they relate to a specific real-world practice. For example, presently I am conducting a project that seeks to understand the basic questions that have been generated with regard to the Davidic covenant within the corpus of the minor prophets. The purpose of this paper is to obtain an idea for the scope and range of research that has been conducted in this area in order to carve out a research starting point that is not redundant. This is by definition a project in applied research.

Practical research is like applied research except that it is more specific. The difference is that practical research into articulating a set of rules that apply to a given circumstance. Applied research aims at generating a set of principles. Principles are general truths that can be used to generate rules. In other words, principles can be applied in many circumstances whereas rules are specific prescriptions for behavior in a specific circumstance. For example, one could theoretically develop a research project on the philosophy of cooking. This project could be theoretical in that it could aim to describe the process of cooking as it is in the world at large – this would be theoretical research project. Or one could conduct a research project into the principles that govern the art of cooking – this would be applied research project. Finally, one could write a cookbook – this is an example of a practical research project. If one keeps the different types of research projects in mind, one can have a better appreciation for how to read a journal article. There's a lot more that could be said, but this should be enough to get you going. Oh, one final hint – most research articles in the field of Biblical Studies are written for the purpose of describing or clarifying an understanding of the Bible – nine times out of 10, you can bet the article is usually a theoretical research project.

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