I often look back
on my own research career with some surprise at where it’s all travelled to.
When I was a PhD student I was a dyed-in-the-wool behaviourist loading rats
into Skinner boxes and clichés into arguments. Cognitions didn’t exist – and
even in the remote possibility that they might, they were of no use to a
scientific psychology. I was a radical Skinnerian pursuing a brave new world in
which behaviour was all that mattered and contingencies of reinforcement would
win out against all the airy-fairy vagaries of other approaches to psychology.
Just a few years on from this I was still wondering why my PhD thesis on the
“determinants of the post-reinforcement pause on fixed-interval schedules in
rats” hadn’t been nominated for a Nobel Prize!
I’ve begun with
this personal example, because it emphasizes how relatively narrow interests
(and views and approaches) can seem like they are the universe – and that is
especially the case when you are personally invested in a specific piece of
research like a PhD thesis. But what happens later on in our academic lives?
Should we stay focused and hone our skills in a focused research niche, or
should we nervously wander out of that niche into new areas with new challenges
requiring new skills?
It is certainly a
question for young academics to think about. Stick with what you know, or get
other strings to your bow? If you are a newly graduated PhD, you are more
likely than not to be a “clone” of your supervisor, and that may well be a
block on you getting a lectureship at the institution in which you did your
research degree. But then most recruiting Departments will want to know that
you are – as they put it - “capable of independent research” before appointing
you. Do you go scrabbling for that last section in your thesis entitled “Future
Directions” and try to stretch out your PhD research (often in a painfully
synthetic way, like seeing how far some bubble-gum will stretch – even though
the ‘amount’ there is still the same). Or do you bite the bullet and try your newly-learnt
skills on some new and different problems?
You have one
career lifetime (unless you’re Buddhist!) – so should you diversity or should
you focus? Let’s begin with those people who focus an entire research career in
one specific area – “the stickers” - often concentrating
on a small, limited number of research problems but maybe have the benefit of
developing more and more refined (and sometimes more complex) theoretical
models. Cripes – how boring! Take that approach and you’ll become one or more of
the following: (a) The person who sits near the front at international
conferences and begins asking questions with the phrase “Thank you for your
very interesting talk, but…”, (b) That butcher of a referee who everyone knows,
even though your reviews are still anonymous, (c) Someone who sits in
Departmental recruitment presentations openly mocking the presentation of any
applicant not in your specific area of research (usually by looking down at
your clasped hands and shaking your head slowly from side to side while
muttering words like “unbelievable” or “where’s the science?”, or, finally, you’ll
become (d) Director of a RCUK National Research Centre.
So what about
taking that giant leap for researcher-kind and diversifying? Well first, it’s
arguably good to have more than one string to your bow, and become a research “juggler”“.
The chances are that at some point you’ll get bored with the programme of
research that you first embarked on in early career. Having at least two
relatively independent streams of research means you can switch your focus from
one to the other. It also increases (a) the range of journals you can publish
in, (b) the funding bodies you can apply to, and (c) the diversity of nice
people you can meet and chat sensibly to at conferences. It can also be a
useful way of increasing your publication rate in early mid-career when you’re
looking for an Associate Editorship to put on your CV or a senior lectureship
to apply for.
But there is more
to diversifying than generating two streams of research purely for pragmatic
career reasons. If you’re a tenured academic, you will probably in principle
have the luxury of being able to carry out research on anything you want to
(within reason) – surely that’s an opportunity that’s too good to miss? B.F.
Skinner himself was one who promoted the scientific principle of serendipity
(a principle that seems to have gone missing from modern day Research Methods
text books) – that is, if something interesting crops up in your research, drop
everything and study it! This apparently was how Skinner began his studies on response
shaping, which eventually led to his treatise on operant conditioning. But
diversity is not always a virtue. There are some entrepreneurial “switchers
and dumpers” out there, who post a new (and largely unsubstantiated)
theory about something in the literature, and then move on to a completely new
(and often more trending) area of research, leaving researchers of the former
topic to fight, bicker and prevaricate, often for years, about what eventually turns
out to be a red herring, or a blind alley, or a complete flight of fancy
designed to grab the headlines at the time.
Now, you’ve
probably got to the point in this post where you’re desperate for me to provide
you with some examples of “stickers”, “jugglers” and “switchers and dumpers” –
well, I think you know who some of these people are already, and I’m not going
to name names! But going back to my first paragraph, if you’d told me as a
postgraduate student about the topics I would be researching now – I would have
been scornfully dismissive. But somehow I got here, and through an interesting
and enjoyable pathway of topics, ideas, and serendipitous routes. Research
isn’t just about persevering at a problem until you’ve tackled it from every
conceivable angle, it’s also an opportunity to try out as many candies in the
shop as you can – as long as you sample responsibly!
Follow me on Twitter at:
No comments:
Post a Comment