academic papers on research methods

Organizing Academic Research Papers: 6. The Methodology

• Purpose of Guide
• Design Flaws to Avoid
• Glossary of Research Terms
• Narrowing a Topic Idea
• Broadening a Topic Idea
• Extending the Timeliness of a Topic Idea
• Academic Writing Style
• Choosing a Title
• Making an Outline
• Paragraph Development
• Executive Summary
• Background Information
• The Research Problem/Question
• Theoretical Framework
• Citation Tracking
• Content Alert Services
• Evaluating Sources
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources
• Tertiary Sources
• What Is Scholarly vs. Popular?
• Qualitative Methods
• Quantitative Methods
• Using Non-Textual Elements
• Limitations of the Study
• Common Grammar Mistakes
• Avoiding Plagiarism
• Footnotes or Endnotes?
• Further Readings
• Annotated Bibliography
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• How to Manage Group Projects
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Essays
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Acknowledgements

The methods section of a research paper provides the information by which a study’s validity is judged. The method section answers two main questions: 1) How was the data collected or generated? 2) How was it analyzed? The writing should be direct and precise and written in the past tense.

Importance of a Good Methodology Section

You must explain how you obtained and analyzed your results for the following reasons:

• Readers need to know how the data was obtained because the method you choose affects the results and, by extension, how you likely interpreted those results.
• Methodology is crucial for any branch of scholarship because an unreliable method produces unreliable results and it misappropriates interpretations of findings .
• In most cases, there are a variety of different methods you can choose to investigate a research problem. Your methodology section of your paper should make clear the reasons why you chose a particular method or procedure .
• The reader wants to know that the data was collected or generated in a way that is consistent with accepted practice in the field of study. For example, if you are using a questionnaire, readers need to know that it offered your respondents a reasonable range of answers to choose from.
• The research method must be appropriate to the objectives of the study . For example, be sure you have a large enough sample size to be able to generalize and make recommendations based upon the findings.
• The methodology should discuss the problems that were anticipated and the steps you took to prevent them from occurring . For any problems that did arise, you must describe the ways in which their impact was minimized or why these problems do not affect the findings in any way that impacts your interpretation of the data.
• Often in social science research, it is useful for other researchers to adapt or replicate your methodology. Therefore, it is important to always provide sufficient information to allow others to use or replicate the study . This information is particularly important when a new method had been developed or an innovative use of an existing method has been utilized.

Bem, Daryl J. Writing the Empirical Journal Article . Psychology Writing Center. University of Washington; Lunenburg, Frederick C. Writing a Successful Thesis or Dissertation: Tips and Strategies for Students in the Social and Behavioral Sciences . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008.

Structure and Writing Style

I. Groups of Research Methods

There are two main groups of research methods in the social sciences:

• The empirical-analytical group approaches the study of social sciences in a similar manner that researchers study the natural sciences. This type of research focuses on objective knowledge, research questions that can be answered yes or no, and operational definitions of variables to be measured. The empirical-analytical group employs deductive reasoning that uses existing theory as a foundation for hypotheses that need to be tested. This approach is focused on explanation .
• The interpretative group is focused on understanding phenomenon in a comprehensive, holistic way . This research method allows you to recognize your connection to the subject under study. Because the interpretative group focuses more on subjective knowledge, it requires careful interpretation of variables.

II. Content

An effectively written methodology section should:

• Introduce the overall methodological approach for investigating your research problem . Is your study qualitative or quantitative or a combination of both (mixed method)? Are you going to take a special approach, such as action research, or a more neutral stance?
• Indicate how the approach fits the overall research design . Your methods should have a clear connection with your research problem. In other words, make sure that your methods will actually address the problem. One of the most common deficiencies found in research papers is that the proposed methodology is unsuited to achieving the stated objective of your paper.
• Describe the specific methods of data collection you are going to use , such as, surveys, interviews, questionnaires, observation, archival research. If you are analyzing existing data, such as a data set or archival documents, describe how it was originally created or gathered and by whom.
• Explain how you intend to analyze your results . Will you use statistical analysis? Will you use specific theoretical perspectives to help you analyze a text or explain observed behaviors?
• Provide background and rationale for methodologies that are unfamiliar for your readers . Very often in the social sciences, research problems and the methods for investigating them require more explanation/rationale than widely accepted rules governing the natural and physical sciences. Be clear and concise in your explanation.
• Provide a rationale for subject selection and sampling procedure . For instance, if you propose to conduct interviews, how do you intend to select the sample population? If you are analyzing texts, which texts have you chosen, and why? If you are using statistics, why is this set of statisics being used? If other data sources exist, explain why the data you chose is most appropriate.
• Address potential limitations . Are there any practical limitations that could affect your data collection? How will you attempt to control for potential confounding variables and errors? If your methodology may lead to problems you can anticipate, state this openly and show why pursuing this methodology outweighs the risk of these problems cropping up.

NOTE :  Once you have written all of the elements of the methods section, subsequent revisions should focus on how to present those elements as clearly and as logically as possibly. The description of how you prepared to study the research problem, how you gathered the data, and the protocol for analyzing the data should be organized chronologically. For clarity, when a large amount of detail must be presented, information should be presented in sub-sections according to topic.

III.  Problems to Avoid

Irrelevant Detail The methodology section of your paper should be thorough but to the point. Don’t provide any background information that doesn’t directly help the reader to understand why a particular method was chosen, how the data was gathered or obtained, and how it was analyzed. Unnecessary Explanation of Basic Procedures Remember that you are not writing a how-to guide about a particular method. You should make the assumption that readers possess a basic understanding of how to investigate the research problem on their own and, therefore, you do not have to go into great detail about specific methodological procedures. The focus should be on how you applied a method , not on the mechanics of doing a method. NOTE: An exception to this rule is if you select an unconventional approach to doing the method; if this is the case, be sure to explain why this approach was chosen and how it enhances the overall research process. Problem Blindness It is almost a given that you will encounter problems when collecting or generating your data. Do not ignore these problems or pretend they did not occur. Often, documenting how you overcame obstacles can form an interesting part of the methodology. It demonstrates to the reader that you can provide a cogent rationale for the decisions you made to minimize the impact of any problems that arose. Literature Review Just as the literature review section of your paper provides an overview of sources you have examined while researching a particular topic, the methodology section should cite any sources that informed your choice and application of a particular method [i.e., the choice of a survey should include any citations to the works you used to help construct the survey].

It’s More than Sources of Information! A description of a research study's method should not be confused with a description of the sources of information. Such a list of sources is useful in itself, especially if it is accompanied by an explanation about the selection and use of the sources. The description of the project's methodology complements a list of sources in that it sets forth the organization and interpretation of information emanating from those sources.

Azevedo, L.F. et al. How to Write a Scientific Paper: Writing the Methods Section. Revista Portuguesa de Pneumologia 17 (2011): 232-238; Butin, Dan W. The Education Dissertation A Guide for Practitioner Scholars . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2010; Carter, Susan. Structuring Your Research Thesis . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Lunenburg, Frederick C. Writing a Successful Thesis or Dissertation: Tips and Strategies for Students in the Social and Behavioral Sciences . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008. Methods Section . The Writer’s Handbook. Writing Center. University of Wisconsin, Madison; Writing the Experimental Report: Methods, Results, and Discussion . The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Methods and Materials . The Structure, Format, Content, and Style of a Journal-Style Scientific Paper. Department of Biology. Bates College.

Writing Tip

Statistical Designs and Tests? Do Not Fear Them!

Don't avoid using a quantitative approach to analyzing your research problem just because you fear the idea of applying statistical designs and tests. A qualitative approach, such as conducting interviews or content analysis of archival texts, can yield exciting new insights about a research problem, but it should not be undertaken simply because you have a disdain for running a simple regression. A well designed quantitative research study can often be accomplished in very clear and direct ways, whereas, a similar study of a qualitative nature usually requires considerable time to analyze large volumes of data and a tremendous burden to create new paths for analysis where previously no path associated with your research problem had existed.

Another Writing Tip

Knowing the Relationship Between Theories and Methods

There can be multiple meaning associated with the term "theories" and the term "methods" in social sciences research. A helpful way to delineate between them is to understand "theories" as representing different ways of characterizing the social world when you research it and "methods" as representing different ways of generating and analyzing data about that social world. Framed in this way, all empirical social sciences research involves theories and methods, whether they are stated explicitly or not. However, while theories and methods are often related, it is important that, as a researcher, you deliberately separate them in order to avoid your theories playing a disproportionate role in shaping what outcomes your chosen methods produce.

Introspectively engage in an ongoing dialectic between theories and methods to help enable you to use the outcomes from your methods to interrogate and develop new theories, or ways of framing conceptually the research problem. This is how scholarship grows and branches out into new intellectual territory.

Reynolds, R. Larry. Ways of Knowing. Alternative Microeconomics. Part 1, Chapter 3. Boise State University; The Theory-Method Relationship . S-Cool Revision. United Kingdom.

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Advanced Research Methods

Writing the research paper.

• What Is Research?
• Library Research
• Writing a Research Proposal

Before Writing the Paper

Methods, thesis and hypothesis, clarity, precision and academic expression, format your paper, typical problems, a few suggestions, avoid plagiarism.

• Presenting the Research Paper

Find a topic.

• Try to find a subject that really interests you.
• While you explore the topic, narrow or broaden your target and focus on something that gives the most promising results.
• Don't choose a huge subject if you have to write a 3 page long paper, and broaden your topic sufficiently if you have to submit at least 25 pages.
• Consult your class instructor (and your classmates) about the topic.

Explore the topic.

• Find primary and secondary sources in the library.
• Read and critically analyse them.
• Take notes.
• Compile surveys, collect data, gather materials for quantitative analysis (if these are good methods to investigate the topic more deeply).
• Come up with new ideas about the topic. Try to formulate your ideas in a few sentences.
• Review your notes and other materials and enrich the outline.
• Try to estimate how long the individual parts will be.
• Do others understand what you want to say?
• Do they accept it as new knowledge or relevant and important for a paper?
• Do they agree that your thoughts will result in a successful paper?
• Qualitative: gives answers on questions (how, why, when, who, what, etc.) by investigating an issue
• Quantitative:requires data and the analysis of data as well
• the essence, the point of the research paper in one or two sentences.
• a statement that can be proved or disproved.
• Be specific.
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Use predominantly the active voice, not the passive.
• Deal with one issue in one paragraph.
• Be accurate.
• Double-check your data, references, citations and statements.

Academic Expression

• Don't use familiar style or colloquial/slang expressions.
• Write in full sentences.
• Check the meaning of the words if you don't know exactly what they mean.
• Avoid metaphors.
• Almost the rough content of every paragraph.
• The order of the various topics in your paper.
• On the basis of the outline, start writing a part by planning the content, and then write it down.
• Put a visible mark (which you will later delete) where you need to quote a source, and write in the citation when you finish writing that part or a bigger part.
• Does the text make sense?
• Could you explain what you wanted?
• Did you write good sentences?
• Is there something missing?
• Check the spelling.
• Complete the citations, bring them in standard format.

Use the guidelines that your instructor requires (MLA, Chicago, APA, Turabian, etc.).

• Adjust margins, spacing, paragraph indentation, place of page numbers, etc.
• Standardize the bibliography or footnotes according to the guidelines.

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(Based on English Composition 2 from Illinois Valley Community College):

• Weak organization
• Poor support and development of ideas
• Weak use of secondary sources
• Excessive errors
• Stylistic weakness

When collecting materials, selecting research topic, and writing the paper:

• Be systematic and organized (e.g. keep your bibliography neat and organized; write your notes in a neat way, so that you can find them later on.
• Use your critical thinking ability when you read.
• Write down your thoughts (so that you can reconstruct them later).
• Stop when you have a really good idea and think about whether you could enlarge it to a whole research paper. If yes, take much longer notes.
• When you write down a quotation or summarize somebody else's thoughts in your notes or in the paper, cite the source (i.e. write down the author, title, publication place, year, page number).
• If you quote or summarize a thought from the internet, cite the internet source.
• Write an outline that is detailed enough to remind you about the content.
• Read your paper for yourself or, preferably, somebody else. 
• When you finish writing, check the spelling;
• Use the citation form (MLA, Chicago, or other) that your instructor requires and use it everywhere.

Plagiarism : somebody else's words or ideas presented without citation by an author

• Cite your source every time when you quote a part of somebody's work.
• Cite your source  every time when you summarize a thought from somebody's work.
• Cite your source  every time when you use a source (quote or summarize) from the Internet.

Consult the Citing Sources research guide for further details.

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Richardson uses her own experience to explore strategies for writing up the same research in different ways. By showing the reader the stylistic and intellectual imperatives and conventions of different writing media she prepares the writer for approaching and successfully addressing diverse audiences. This book will be useful to all social scientists trying to present their material in different ways.

Writing Academic Papers

• By: Laurel Richardson
• In: Writing Strategies
• Chapter DOI: https:// doi. org/10.4135/9781412986526.n8
• Subject: Anthropology , Business and Management , Criminology and Criminal Justice , Communication and Media Studies , Counseling and Psychotherapy , Economics , Education , Geography , Health , History , Marketing , Nursing , Political Science and International Relations , Psychology , Social Policy and Public Policy , Social Work , Sociology
• Keywords: authority ; discourse ; framing ; journals ; marital status ; rhetorical devices ; secret relationships ; single women ; social science ; sociology ; status ; tradition
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Academic papers are encoded with the same academic codes discussed earlier in the scholarly encoding of The New Other Woman , but there are other conventions, as well (e.g., length, focus, narrative stance, etc.). Some of these conventions are probably erroneous and should be avoided, while others, although possibly erroneous, may have to be followed, if the author needs to be published in certain journals.

Depending on how the journal positions itself in the postmodernist world, the would-be writer might be expected to write a realistic description, an hypothesis-generating piece, theory, science, members' accounts, a deconstruction, a reflexive analysis, and so on. Most journals have fairly traditional standards of writing up research, however, and most readers expect those traditional standards to be met. For the writer with postmodernist sensibilities this raises complex representational problems. Rather than trying to spell out all those problems in this section, I am going to look at some ways in which qualitative work can be shaped to meet traditional academic standards, without the author being overwhelmed by feelings of self-annihilation in the process. The problems are rhetorical and writerly ones, such as narrative stance, tone, and metaphor.

One of the most important things for qualitative researchers to bear in mind is that they can write up the same material in different ways. The material is malleable. That is why we call it material. How we shape the material depends upon how far along we are in our research, and who we want to read it, for what reasons. The same material can be shaped into a realist article, a postmodernist one, or some admixture of the two. Writing it one way does not preclude writing it from a different frame. Because collecting qualitative data is labor intensive and much of what is collected does not fit into one article, it makes sense to write a number of different pieces, from different angles at different stages of the project.

In-Progress Papers

Writing is often thought of as writing up final results in the final stages of the research process, a writing model that, coincidentally, fits nicely with the funding model of research, but not with the qualitative research process. Instead, I would suggest writing in-progress papers. Through in-progress writing you lay claim to a research territory, formulate proposals for grants, and improve your self-reflexivity: what is your attitude toward the material? what do you think you know? how are you expressing it? In-progress papers might be academically minor, but literarily major because they help you find your frame, tone, narrative stance, metaphors, and audience.

Narrative Stance

Qualitative writers are frequently told to present their work as exploratory research. The exploratory researcher stance, however, does not serve the interests of the writer or of qualitative research, in general — nor is it an accurate depiction of the intentions of most qualitative research. Exploratory research is a code within empiricist discourse referring to research leading to quantitative research, not research done for its own sake and instead of quantitative work. Dubbing qualitative research exploratory serves the interests of logico-empiricist textbooks and journals, but it diminishes and distorts the qualitative enterprise. When research is framed as exploratory, the message is that the paper is of dubious value, and its findings should not be taken very seriously. The exploratory stance implicitly presents qualitative research as foreplay to the desired big, but nonforthcoming-in-this-paper, statistical climax.

The exploratory stance, although prevalent in in-progress papers, is toxic to the novice researcher because exploratory papers often end up being unpublishable, boring, or both. The meaningfulness of qualitative methodology gets lost because the exploratory stance tends to produce the worst of both qualitative and quantitative writing: undeveloped theoretical material, a dearth of dense description (Denzin, 1989), and a barrage of “baby stats,” like percentages and frequency tables.

There are, however, alternative ways to frame research so that the preliminary, open-ended, and in-progress state of the project is not denied, masked, or diminished, but built upon. I discuss two such alternatives: the “typology” and the “continuum.” Although these normally require an omniscient narrator, some of the poststructuralist issues surrounding omniscience can be adjudicated in the textual staging.

The Typology

The typology , constituting the material in terms of a classification scheme or “types” of X , is a powerful rhetorical device that does not undermine your own research or the entire qualitative research enterprise. The purpose of a typology for a qualitative researcher is not the creation of an exhaustive classificatory scheme, which may be the goal of logico-empiricists, but (a) to find something in your material worthy of classification and (b) to provide some of the categories. This is a modest, worthy, and attainable goal. The first paper I wrote on the “Other Woman,” for example, was a typology of how these liaisons ended. The idea of writing about endings was not my own but was in a “Call for Papers” on that topic for a special edition of a highly respected qualitative journal (Richardson, 1979a). (Serendipity, again.) Endings was the “something” worth talking about, and based on my already completed interviews, I could construct three ideal types of endings and provide ample description of them. I did not claim an all-encompassing analysis.

Typologies are excellent rhetorical devices for framing qualitative work, for they can be written with an open-endedness, help the researcher sift through ethnographic materials in a focused way, and permit the writing to be about something — as opposed to everything — in the project. Inductively constructing a typology permits you, I believe, to deal effectively with both positivist-empiricist writing pressures and with postmodernist ones. Although you might be pushed by the (false) consciousness of empiricist publishers/reviewers to tell how many or what percent fit into which category, you can resist the pressure by artfully staging typology as a sociological tool that eschews counting. Max Weber, for example, did not say how many people were charismatic, legal rational, or traditional in their exercise of authority, and nor did the prolific taxonomist Talcott Parsons specify numerical frequencies for any of his categorical designations. The purpose of a typology is to offer categories — not to fill in the cells.

Some of the postmodernist problems with typologies, further, can be blunted by the way one constructs and presents them. Issues of representation, authority, and authorial presence can be attended to through considerations such as the following: presenting the typology as a sociohistorical construction rather than a universal or eternal one; grounding the categories in the lived experiences of people; inductively constructing the typology; analyzing how your implicit moral stance is conveyed through such devices as the labels attached to categories (what is labeled deviant, what is devalued, etc.), the ordering of the categories in the schema, the amount of space given to discussion of each category, and so on; and revising — “re-visioning” — by decentering your authority, and privileging those who have been marginalized in texts.

The Continuum

Another rhetorical frame for qualitative papers, particularly useful for in-progress writing, is the continuum , an imaginary construction of an X along which objects (people, events, processes, things) can be arrayed. It is a modest approach, a way of looking at some material in a particular way at this particular time, and can thus be positioned within the postmodernist critique. If you do not reinscribe the idea of endpoints to a continuum, a metaphor borrowed from a branch of mathematics and useful for quantitative analyses, then you can “play” with poststructuralist ideas of continuity and discreteness, and reveal the dualisms in your work. For example, gender research posited a masculine/feminine continuum with masculine being at one end of the continuum, and feminine at the other end. This continuum reinscribed sex-stereotypes and binary thinking about the nature of men and women. Gender researchers now think about masculinity and femininity as fluid, situational, historical, and so on. This open-ended approach to continuum construction helps us to think about changes and differences, a postmodernist impulse, rather than fixedness and sameness.

Early in the research on the Other Woman, I hypothesized a power-imbalance continuum, such that whoever had the greatest power — which was usually, but not always, the male — had the most to gain and the least to suffer at the termination of the relationship. By conceptualizing a power-imbalance continuum I was able to look at how power interacted with gender, rather than assuming it did so in some prescribed way (1979b). That analysis broke down my dualistic thinking about gender (male/female), decentered the idea of a universal other woman, and forced me to look for differences and distinctions between women.

Getting Feedback

Whatever the rhetorical stance, though, presenting material in a public forum early in the project helps researchers hear what they are, perhaps, nonreflexively believing about their material, because listeners respond to tone more than they do to content. Audience comments on early papers, such as, “Why are you so hard on men?” and “Why are you so hard on single women?” and “Why are you opposed to marriage?” had me thinking that my findings were a projective test and that people were projecting on to the study their own moral (or personal) circumstances. Although some listeners/readers will always be “tone deaf,” and although there will always be multiple interpretations of a text, what the author learns from the mishearing/misreading is how the writing tone may be off, tentative, or inexplicitly shifting keys — or how your authorial intentions are unfocused, ambivalent, or undermined by striking false literary notes. The multiple responses push you into examining your hidden agendas and uncertainties. You cannot finally control how readers will respond to your work, but you can use literary devices to up the odds in favor of others understanding your point of view — that is of responding to what you intend to communicate. Since authorial intentions reflect the moral and political position of the writer, these matters are not simply literary.

Later Papers

As the researcher's understanding of the researched world deepens and expands, how one can shape the material also deepens and expands. The writing options are many. In a complex project there are multiple events, parts, and processes and multiple insights and theoretical possibilities. Others, such as Denzin (1989), Fox (1985), Glaser and Strauss (1967), Long (1988), and Van Maanen (1988), and Wolcott (1990) provide some excellent general guidance for writing qualitative articles, and the preceding section of this book is also relevant to that problem. You may decide, for example, that a more complete typology or more complex continua are good devices for displaying your findings. Or you may want to write a more experimental, reflexive, or “confessional” piece (see Van Maanen, 1988). The stylistic opportunities for social science writers in the postmodernist context in which we live are many and enticing.

In this section I want to focus on the problem of shaping qualitative research into papers for positivist-empiricist social science journals, for example, The American Sociological Review, Social Forces , and The American Journal of Sociology. Many qualitative researchers believe that it is nearly impossible to get a paper accepted in these journals and therefore do not submit papers to them. Yet, academics are hired, tenured, and promoted on the basis of their publications in these journals; these are the journals that define disciplinary boundaries and socialize graduate students. Qualitative researchers may lament the domination of positivist-empiricist journals, but they need to acknowledge — if only to undermine — the power of these journals to “discipline” the discipline.

Shaping qualitative material for mainline journals requires telling your research story in a way that meets the expectations of the editors/reviewers of those journals. Quantitative writers have an easier time with this, for their work is already strongly encoded as positivist-empiricist (through such rhetorical devices as tables and path diagrams) and because the criteria for judging the work is more precise and shared among the community of believers. Qualitative writers have a more difficult time, I think, because their papers have fewer strong encodings, and their reviewers have fewer and less precise agreements about significance and other such matters, making it difficult for the editor to say revise and resubmit and even more difficult for the writer to figure out how to revise and resubmit. Also, there is the belief that the articles should be published before the book, which makes considerable sense for findings from quantitative work (which rarely become a book, anyway), but less sense for qualitative research, because it is usually not until you have finished writing a book that you have digested, expanded, and theorized your work sufficiently to be able to compress it or reframe it for submission to a major social science journal.

In the case of the single woman/married man project, I decided, after the trade book had already been published, that I wanted to shape some of the material into an article for publication in The American Sociological Review. I wanted (my) graduate students to feel more confidence in the publishability of qualitative work in mainline journals, and I wanted the study's content to enter sociology's consciousness. I also wanted to redeem myself, professionally, feeling that the unexpected media attention to my trade book had besmirched my reputation. But mostly I wanted the writing challenge: Could I turn a piece of work that had four strikes against it — methodology, topic, perspective, media attention — into an ASR article without compromising myself as a politically situated actor?

In shaping the article, I chose the emotional, sociological, and political center of the book: how social arrangements, particularly secrecy, facilitated single women falling in love with married men and, how these liaisons favored men, as a class, over women, as a class. The editor's and reviewers' comments on early drafts were very helpful. I treated their comments as genuine questions generated by their empiricist discourse and/or indicators of textual faults (tone, clarity, point-of-view, narrative stance, etc.), rather than as attacks upon the value of the work. I thought of the reviewers not as rigid empiricist enemies but as audience, and I integrated their readings of my text into its reshaping. Their comments invited me into their discourse. Based on my writing/reading of my own text and my reading of the reviewers' readings of my writings, I re-visioned and wrote a paper that did finally appear in the American Sociological Review (1988b).

After several false starts, bouts of self-doubt, and lots of thinking time, I finally wrote the paper from the narrative stance of what I have come to think of as the limited sociologist. I explicitly positioned myself within the taken-for-granted apparatus of normal social science, which requires identifying oneself with a theoretical tradition and methodological approach. Labeling the paper is a writing convention that helps the reader know how to read the paper. I identified myself with social constructionist symbolic interactionism and, then, in a normal social science move, callously challenged that tradition for overlooking an important conceptual linkage, the linkage between status and secrecy. I did not write cynically but saw the sociological audience as a genuine audience to whom I wanted to speak.

My rhetorical plan was to make limited claims for the statistical representativeness of my findings — but unlimited claims to their generality and theoretical significance. This plan guided my writing decisions and demanded textual staging beginning with the title and the first two paragraphs of the paper.

The title of the paper, “Secrecy and Status: The Social Construction of Forbidden Relationships” (Richardson, 1988b), keyed two core sociological concepts, status and relationship, identified a theoretical home, social construction; and signaled new conceptual links, secrecy and status and forbidden relationships. The specific substantive content (single women/married men) was absent, as were feminist and trade encodings. The paper begins:

Eighty years ago, Georg Simmel proposed that all social relationships “can be characterized by the amount and kind of secrecy within them and around them” (1950, p. 331). Yet, how status and secrecy affect the construction of a social relationships has been little studied. The purpose of this paper is to theorize how status and secrecy affect the construction of a particular category of relationships: secret, forbidden, sexual relationships. (p. 209)

Tradition (“Eighty years ago”), authority (“Georg Simmel”), sociology (“social relationships”), importance (“all;” “yet,…”), implicit measurability (“amount and kind”), conceptual linkage (“secrecy and status”), theoretical level (“purpose … is to theorize”), theoretical tradition (“construction”), specific citation ([1950, p. 331]), research focus (“particular category”), and categorizability (“category of relationships”) all are deployed in the first paragraph. There is no “I” here, no identified author; rather, I speak as a disembodied authority in the omniscient voice of science. For good measure, the second sentence is written in the passive voice, eliminating human agency in others' research endeavors, as well. The tone is matter-of-fact, and the language is plain, the metaphors being those that go unnoticed by sociologists (e.g., status, relationship, and the grammatical demarcation of subject and object.) These are all rhetorical devices to signal the paper as mainline sociology.

The first paragraph, however, ends on a potentially suspect note: “secret, forbidden, sexual relationships.” Can these be of “general” sociological interest, an ASR criterion, given sociology's penchant for public, legitimated, and asexual relationships? Because “secret, forbidden, sexual relationships,” moreover, are grammatically set off in the text by a semicolon and positioned as the last three words of the paragraph, I have given them a very strong placement. They cannot be ignored. Was this a wise rhetorical move on my part? ASR conventions require that you tell the reader what your problem is in the first paragraph, so telling something is unavoidable. My decision was to cloak the specific something (the data base of single women/married men), but to accentuate “secret, forbidden, sexual relationships,” and then make the case that these were not trivial, uncommon, rare, or without theoretical significance. The eventual acceptance of the paper, I felt, depended upon my convincing the reviewers, first, that the category of relationships fulfilled the generality criterion, and second that the particular case (single women/married men) was theoretically and empirically paradigmatic of the category.

Writing “Generality”

The task of the second paragraph, then, was to convince readers that there was something of general sociological interest going on in the paper they were about to read, not just sex or deviance, and to prepare them through the subtext for the substantive focus. Because the readers probably hold a number of cultural stereotypes about the topic, it was especially important to write a sociologically forceful second paragraph. To do this, I returned immediately to Simmel, tradition, citations, and sociological concepts, writing:

The secret, to paraphrase Simmel (1950, p. 330), was one of the major achievements of humankind because it permitted an immense enlargement of the world, the possibility of hiding reality and creating a second world alongside the manifest one. The secret, he argued, is a general sociological form of major significance, regardless of its content. Because some measure of secrecy exists in all relationships, ignoring it limits our understanding of how social relationships are constructed and maintained. (1988b, p. 209)

Secrets, in this paragraph, are elevated to “major achievements,” “a general form,” and of “major significance” “regardless of content.” Secrecy exists in “all relationships,” and, therefore, unless we understand it (wherever it exists), our understanding of “how [all] social relationships” are constructed is “limited.” While secrets are made rhetorically central to sociological understanding, the subtext of illicit relationships as sociological worlds — a second world alongside the manifest one, as interesting (maybe more so) and as valid a world to study (regardless of content) — is introduced and legitimated through reliance upon Simmel's authority in these matters. The exact focus of the project has not yet been stated but the argument for its importance has been framed. (It is an argument, incidentally, that I not only staged but believe.)

From here on through the end of the introduction, the task is to maintain the narrative stance and advance the case for the generality and importance of the research. Writing the introduction deductively is one of the most important literary devices. The actual inductive processes that characterize qualitative research in general, and my research in particular, are masked. The social science model of writing, in effect, requires researchers to suppress the story of their own research, the human processes through which their work was constituted over time. Deductively staged writing seems godlike, objective, eternal, and true — rather than human, positioned, temporal, and partially true, which it is, as all writing is — and therefore consonant with the preferred science writing model. It is not until the final paragraph of the Introduction that “I” appear, but even then, not as an observer but as a theory generator.

Throughout the introduction, I hold the (mono)tone of disinterest, develop the conceptual argument, cite appropriate authorities, and provide evidence for the endemic prevalence of “secret, forbidden, sexual” liaisons, with the single woman/married man relationship finally singled out as the paradigmatic exemplar. Drawing upon a diverse literature in gender, marriage and the family, culture studies, and demography positions the article within multiple sociological discourses, engaging readers who read through different encodings. The gender literature plays a special role in the paper, because it signals to feminists the paper's relevance to feminist agendas.

Writing Methods and “Findings”

The procedures section, which is requisite and positioned second in the article, is relatively long, detailing the standard methods issues regarding in-depth interviewing, sampling, reliability, validity, and representativeness, but it is a section in which “I,” the researcher, exist. Readers of the ASR want to know about methods because procedures rank high within the logico-empiricist metaphors and models of rationality. For qualitative researchers, who usually work inductively, writing out specific procedures may feel both troublesome and falsifying. I saw my task, though, as finding ways to write within the logico-empiricist discursive space — to talk to this audience as respectfully as I would to the people I was studying. By taking the writerly (and psychological) position that empiricists were curious about the methods, not sitting back ready to demolish my procedures, I could write straightforwardly and nondefensively about the methods, issues, and processes that are of concern to them. Rhetorically, I again highlighted generality, concluding the section:

All generalizations are based on the dominant pattern or the clear majority of respondents. When I quote from a particular interview, it represents a common interview theme. Since the interviews were open and fluid, not all respondents volunteered all themes. However, I do not discuss themes or processes that are not general. (1988b, p. 212)

Placing generality claims at the conclusion of the procedures section privileges it and prepares the reader for the substantive material to follow.

Rather than writing the results in a single section called findings, I shaped the material into two sections paralleling the two stages (“Stage One: Becoming Confidants” and “Stage Two: Becoming a We”) in the process of intimacy construction. The rhetorical devices of stages and gerunds (“Becoming”) prepare the reader (and prime the writer) for a narrative , the linking of sequential events in a storylike, causal way. However, because the story is being told in the ASR , the plot line is frequently interrupted by sociological analysis and commentary by the reemerged omniscient scientist. “I” am gone. The writing problem is simultaneously to tell the Other Woman's collective story, which is the finding, and explicitly moor it in sociological discourse, thereby displaying its face validity, generality, and sociological credibility.

Several literary techniques were deployed to accomplish this writing task. First, the Stage sections begin with theoretical statements, citations, and announcement of findings and the order in which I will discuss them. That is, I give the plot away; I do not write a mystery story, as I did for The New Other Woman. Throughout these findings sections, I weave back and forth from theoretical questions and other people's research findings to the concrete experiences and voices of the women I interviewed, tying the voices to the theory, the theory to the voices. I never stay very long at either level, because I want the collective story to be tied, in the reader's mind, with its sociological significance. As a result, I integrate quotations within paragraphs, avoiding entirely the qualitative writing conventions of long quotes, many quotes, and indented quotes, because these tend to call attention to themselves rather than to the text in which they are framed.

Similarly, I use other literary devices — such as sentence structure, phrase length, images and metaphors, jargon, paragraphing — to sustain the rhetorical thrust of the article and to suppress some narrative elements. None of the quoted women, for example, have a name or biographical history; the social production of the interviews, an interactive event that I staged, is absent; and the women's voices are written as examples, deploying what ethnomethodologists might call the taken-for-granted assumption that something can be simultaneously unique and general.

The concluding section, discussion, begins with a review of theoretically relevant findings, latches onto an analysis of marriage privilege, and concludes with a feminist/progressive message. I textually prepare for the concluding message through the ordering of the findings. The last two elements listed are “how the man's marital status is structurally conducive to idealization of the relationship; and how prioritizing the man's marital status disempowers the women” (1988b, p. 217). These are linked to the discussions of “status,” “marital status,” “man's marital status,” and “gender and power,” which are “logically” demanded by the prior framing. After drawing analogies with other secret power-imbalanced relationships, I conclude:

Secret relationships protect the interests of those with the greater status and power … Status differences are carried into the forbidden liaison, and rules are generated that protect the person with the higher status. In a very profound sense, then, secret, forbidden, sexual relationships are no sociological surprise. They reinforce and perpetuate the interests of the powerful. (p. 218)

The textual staging prepares the reader for the standpoint of the last paragraph, when at last I can shed the posture of the limited sociologist and recover — or uncover — my own voice as an activist sociologist, who has values and politics that will be heard even in this science journal. Synecdoche, once again, has been an (hidden) ally.

Writing A Trade Book

Writing for Mass Circulation

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