I must admit that research philosophy was (and still is) the most challenging part of my research project.
I read lots of books and articles on research methodology and the moment I thought I had grabbed the concept I encountered something contradictory and I felt totally at a loss.
Anyway, somehow I managed to write my methodology chapter for my upgrade report and it went through. Subsequently, on the basis of the approved research methodology, I collected the required data.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The aim of sharing the detail was that research is no joke. We don’t jump to conclusions that easily. Nowadays, when we browse through various social media sites and see people generalizing and building up opinions based on nothing but their own faulty worldviews, you cannot avoid getting frustrated.
So I decided to transform this negative feeling into something positive. I thought about contributing to knowledge and invent a new school of thought – a new research paradigm that has already been adopted by 87 percent of social media users (validity of this number will be explained after the paradigm is proposed).
The research paradigm that I am proposing is called the “Selfie” research approach. Although the name “Selfie” has been already reserved to the type of photos taken in front of the camera, which I am sure is done to distort our images intentionally by showing our noses three times bigger than their actual sizes. But I will use the term anyway. In the Selfie school of thought, the world is constructed based on your view of it and how you perceive it personally, if you see it black but it’s actually red then by adopting this approach, it’s red. This approach is very flexible and has loose boundaries, if for example you want to do a research on how many women are drama queens, you can simply take your immediate relatives as a theoretical sampling and go directly on twitter and say “98 percent of women are drama queens,” and the validity of your research will be determined by the number of retweets you get, and if someone expressed any opinion that opposes your “Selfie” research, you can easily shut him/her off claiming that they are just haters who hate researchers or on the other hand, are drama queens/kings who hate the fact that you revealed them using the “Selfie” research approach.
Dissemination of this type of research is very easy and straightforward, all you need is a social media account (twitter, Facebook, google plus, instagram…etc.) and you are ready to publish all the results of your “Selfie” researches (in my case, I have this column where I publish my Selfie research result mentioned above about the 87 percent social media users), and while it might take months or sometimes years to get this published in a scientific journal, in the “Selfie” it’s a matter of minutes or sometimes seconds if your mind is capable of making up stories in just seconds. In fact, the best “Selfie” researches are published through WhatsApp broadcasts. On those broadcasts, you see “Selfies of Selfies” where someone broadcast something after adding other “Selfie” research results to the original one, this way, you get broadcasts that have gone through different levels of “Selfie researches,” and in that case, you can imagine how “valid” the results are, and the irony is that they are valid enough for your mom or sister to set up rules in the house that a particular type of food is banned based on the “Selfie of Selfie” research she got through her WhatsApp account.
Anyway, after maintaining a twitter account and WhatsApp for more than three years, I really wonder as to why I am doing my research the hard way if it can be done easily the “Selfie” way. Ironic isn’t it?
