This document provides an overview of research methods for a course on TransD Research Methods. It discusses key concepts in research including ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods. It then presents details on a project evaluating digital design literacy in education, including its goals to develop a taxonomy and conceptual model. It lists relevant background and research questions for the project. The document also introduces the instructor and provides examples of their recent publications. It concludes with discussions of research questions and the differences between qualitative and quantitative inquiry.

1. CTEC810 TransD Research Methods
Week 2
Nau Mai, Welcome
Course: https://blackboard.aut.ac.nz

2. Ontology
What is the nature of reality?
Epistemology
What can we know about reality?
Methodology
How can we go about building that knowledge?
Methods
What actions can we implement to build that knowledge?
Findings
What can we grasp, collect, analyse, evaluate, apply?

3. Qualities and Criteria for Evaluating
Digital Design Literacy in Education (CC),
(4+4/5+3), 2020-9
This project develops a qualitative understanding of the state-of-the-actual in
terms of students’ use, experiences and understandings of everyday digital
technologies and their ability to deploy more advanced technologies as a
means to proactively engage in the design of digital artefacts.
The project will produce a taxonomy for students’ digital design literacy both
in relation to understanding existing digital technologies and engaging in the
design of future digital technologies, and deliver a conceptual model for
educators to evaluate students’ digital literacy as part of curriculum-based
education.
The ideal candidate has a background in digital design, child-computer
interaction, participatory design, design research in the area of emerging
technologies, with the ability to conduct empirical and intervention-based
research.
Research questions:
• Which competencies supports children’s ’digital design literacy’?
• What are the evaluation criteria that applies to digital design literacy with
emerging technologies?
• How is digital design literacy supported in a progressive development
through educational levels?
https://phd.arts.au.dk/applicants/open-and-specific-
calls/phd-call-2020-9/

5. Instructor
Dr Ricardo Sosa
• https://www.aut.ac.nz/profiles?id=rsosa
• ricardo.sosa@aut.ac.nz
• Twitter: @designcomputing
Recent publications:
• Accretion theory of ideation. Design Science, doi:10.1017/dsj.2019.22
• Creativity in graduate business education. Innovations in Education and
Teaching, doi:10.1080/14703297.2019.1628799
• Innovation Teams and Organizational Creativity: Reasoning with
Computational Simulations. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and
Innovation, doi:10.1016/j.sheji.2018.03.004
• Metrics to select design tasks in experimental creativity research. Part C:
Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, doi:10.1177/0954406218778305
• The A-Z of Creative Technologies. Transactions on Creative Technologies,
doi:10.4108/eai.10-4-2018.154460

6. ’70s ’80s 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
Opportunity Lab
creativity
&
cognition 3

8. Research Questions
• Questions to investigate meanings or processes
• Questions to describe variance or relationships among variables of interest
• Questions for change initiatives or policy
• Not always in question format (motivation, positioning)
• Activity:
• Identify RQs guiding studies in your area of interest
• Collect open RQs formulated for future work
• Write down 15 ways of framing what you want to know
• Check your RQs for clarity, value, feasibility, possible outcomes, type of study,
originality. Refine
• Cluster your RQs by type, scale, etc.
• Search the literature using your selected RQs

10. “Method? What we’re dealing with here is not, of course,
just method. It is not just a set of techniques. It is not just a
philosophy of method, a methodology. It is not even simply
about the kinds of realities that we want to recognise or
the kinds of worlds we might hope to make. It is also, and
most fundamentally, about a way of being. It is about the
kinds of people that we want to be, and about how we
should live.”
page 10

11. • “Which [empathy] methods or practices can be applied for which
kind of project, and for which goals? Our goal is to provide
descriptions of methods/practices, and to systematically compare
between these methods/practices. We do not intend to prescribe
specific methods or practices, or to prove that certain methods or
certain practices are more successful than others, nor is it our goal
to study the reliability of end-users’ utterances, or the success of
the products which result from human-centred design.
• 1. Do students engage in reflection in narratives on uncertainty
and if so, what aspects of reflection do students include in their
writing? 2. Do student attitudes toward uncertainty change over
the course of a semester, and if so, how?
• 1. What were students' experiences in the cognitive and affective
domains while participating in activities pertaining to the inclusive
design unit in the Human Factors course? 2. How did the
simulation and follow-up activities, including written reflections
and poster designs, support the course objectives pertaining to the
cognitive and affective domains?
• How can thinking processes that guarantee innovation best be
taught and how can they be supported in daily practice?

12. • Does an empathy building program for middle school students
affect bullying behavior?
• Does going online affect empathy through a reduction of face-to-
face time?
• Does empathic concern moderate the relationship between a
persuasive message designed to elicit anticipated guilt and the
subsequent anticipation of guilt?
• First, do gender differences in empathy generalize to similar
constructs such as forgiveness? Second, does gender moderate
the relationship between empathy and forgiveness, and, as such,
is empathy a more important predictor of forgiveness for women
or men?
• (1) What are the changes in student self-report of empathy over
time? (2) What is the significance of the sample demographic
characteristics and the overall score of empathy? (3) What is the
association of nursing students’ empathy and standardized
actors SAs’ assessment of student empathy? and (4) What is the
perception of the nursing students’ use of simulation with SAs as
it relates to empathy and their future practice?

13. • What a design attitude actually is made of has not been researched.
In this study I therefore investigate the nature of this attitude, as
displayed by professional designers.
• Little work has been conducted to investigate how designers’
personal experiences can contribute to technology design. Yet it’s
undeniable designers have applied their personal experiences to
their design practice and also benefited from such experiences. This
paper … looks at how interaction designers worked with their
personal experiences in three industrial interaction design projects,
thus calling for the need to explicitly recognize the legitimacy of
using and better support of the use of designers’ personal
experiences in interaction design practice.
• Despite the increasing awareness of the relevance of empathy in
patient care, some findings suggest that medical schools may be
contributing to the deterioration of students’ empathy. Therefore, it
is important to clarify the magnitude and direction of changes in
empathy during medical school.
• How do instructional designers describe their experiences of
demonstrating empathy when making instructional strategy
decisions for adult learners in higher educational settings?

14. “The picture of method starts to shift. The argument is no
longer that methods discover and depict realities. Instead,
it is that they participate in the enactment of those
realities. It is also that method is not just a more or less
complicated set of procedures or rules, but rather a
bundled hinterland. This stretches through skills,
instruments and statements (in-here enactments of
previous methods) through the out-there realities so
described, into a ramifying and indefinite set of relations,
places and assumptions that disappear from view.”
page 45

15. Sample Research Questions From Different Inquiry Worldviews
Positivism
What is the relationship between exercise self-efficacy and the
amount of time spent exercising per week for mothers who
have given birth within the last year?
Interpretivism-Constructivism
How do mothers who have given birth within the last year talk
about exercising time?
Critical Worldview
How do self-perceptions of female body image influence new
mothers’ confidence about exercising?
Transformative-Participatory
How can mothers who have given birth in the last year organize
and implement programs of exercise in their community?
Pragmatism-Pluralism
How do women who gave birth at age 40+ experience exercise
in their daily life?
Queer
(How) does societal heteronormativity influence parenting
beliefs among queer youth with queer parents?
Adapted from: DeCuir-Gunby, J. & Schutz, P. (2017). Chapter 3 asking appropriate research questions. In
DeCuir-Gunby, J., & Schutz, P. Developing a mixed methods proposal: A practical guide for beginning
researchers (pp. 33-44). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781483399980

16. How do self-perceptions of female body image influence new mothers’
confidence about exercising?
(How) does societal heteronormativity influence parenting beliefs among
queer youth with queer parents?

17. Main Differences Between Qualitative and Quantitative Intellectual Inquiry
Qualitative Inquiry Quantitative Inquiry
• Assumes subjective reality is socially constructed • Assumes there is an objective reality ready to be discovered
• Appreciates complexity and multiple truths • Favours parsimony and assumes a single truth
• Research is value bound, and the researcher’s values are accounted for • Research is value neutral, and the researcher’s values are muted
• The researcher is the primary instrument (observations, interviews) • Uses inanimate instruments (scales, questionnaires, checklists, tests)
• Contextualizes findings • Generalizes results from a sample to a population
• Portrays natural settings and contexts • Manipulates and controls variables
• Few participants, many variables • Few variables, many subjects
• Understands the insider’s view • Presents the objective outsiders’ view
• Human behavior is situational • Human behavior is regular
• Interprets human behavior in context • Predicts human behavior
• Understands perspectives (empathetic) and exploration • Provides causal explanations
• Widely, deeply examines phenomena • Narrowly tests specific hypotheses
• Focuses on essence, and nature • Focuses on measurements
• Uses inductive then deductive logic • Uses deductive then inductive logic
• Searches for patterns and looks for complexity • Analyzes discrete components looking for the norm
• Uses purposive sampling • Uses random sampling
• Single cases or small samples • Large samples with statistical power
• The research design is emergent and evolving • The research design is predetermined
• Data are words, images, and categories • Data are numbers (minor use of words)
• Nonlinear, iterative, and creative analysis • Linear, standardized, and prescribed analysis
• Thematic, patterned analysis of data • Statistical analysis of data
• Power in rich descriptions and detail • Statistical power
• Reports are written in expressive, holistic language (thick descriptions) • Reports are written in precise, conventional, abstract language
• Some studies create theory from the findings • Use theory to ground the study and interpret results
• Generates understandings from patterns • Test hypotheses that are born from theory
• Faces conceptual complexity • Faces statistical complexity
• Strives for trustworthy, credible data • Strives for reliable and valid data
McGregor, S. (2018). Overview of research design and methods. In McGregor,
S. Understanding and evaluating research (pp. 207-226). Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE Publications, Inc doi: 10.4135/9781071802656

18. The sessions started with a brief demonstration of each robot by
the research assistant and then participants could use each robot for
up to 10 min (Fig. 1). After interacting with each robot students
and teachers were asked open-ended questions for iRobiQ and
Paro separately (see Tables 1, 2). The students were also asked if
the robots made them more interested in science and technology.
Finally, the teachers were asked to consider 10 tasks a robot could
perform at school and rate whether these would be useful using a
scale from 0 (“not useful at all”), 1 “somewhat useful”, or 2 (“very
useful”).

19. Mapping the landscape
• Finding your way:
• Develop a long list of variations of your RQs
• Use your Working Title, keywords and RQ to locate the
most relevant sources:
• Catalogues, journals, conferences, book series
• Identify key authors & groups
• Reviews and special issues can save you time (recent)

20. Abstracts
• A good abstract includes:
• Justification for the work done, approach
• Method(s), how was the work carried out
• Outcomes and contributions
• Scope of what is discussed, concluded

24. Justification and Positioning
• Why the work needs to be done?
• Why it can be done this way?
• What specifically needs to be done?
• Who would this benefit? Who is this for?
• What is the contribution?
• How is the contribution assessed?
• What would be the impact?

25. Weekly homework
• Expand your search (a variety of RQ versions, keywords,
other databases, other type of sources)
• Select five (5) journal papers
• Analyse and comment on:
• Your search strategy and findings
• Currency of findings
• Their title, abstract, keywords
• Structure of the papers (sections, length)
• Research method(s) that they use
• Justification and positioning of those studies/projects