All research does some things and not others. There are lots of ways in research writing to signal what we do, and don’t do.  Heere’s some of the most important.

Problem posing – how we understand the puzzle or problem we are interested in is always a matter of choosing what we think is most important. And what isn’t. Our writing gives readers detailed explanations of our puzzle/problem and its boundaries.  Telling the reader what we will and won’t be doing is integral to creating the warrant for our research and the potential contribution.

Definitions  – we generally have to tell readers our understandings of a key term/an idea. Definitions always help us to emphasise, foreground and include ‘stuff’ as well as exclude and send other stuff to the background. Our research writings generally define key terms early on – but of course if terms are part of the problem, or are the problem, then researchers devote all available space to discussing meanings.

Objectives – research objectives are always specific and geared to the particular research we want to do.  Generally, objectives point to the tangible things that we will end up with when we finish the research – these are often called outputs or deliverables. Objectives help us narrow our overall research aims and signal what is in and out of scope. Research proposals and funding bids often call for objectives because readers/funders want to see what they  will get. When we write objectives we have to take great care to specify exactly what we will do and offer to readers/users

Question – the research question (or questions) also helps to frame the scope of the research. What we include and exclude, and how tightly we focus on what we are interested in are encapsulated in the wording of our question ( or hypothesis). Dissertations and research reports generally tell the reader early on the questions that they will be reading about. Journal articles in the social sciences and humanities tend not to have questions but address specific puzzles and problems with aims/purposes of the paper made clear early.

Literatures – what we read is drawn from and indicative of the scholarly area we want to contribute to. We always make a selection from a range of reading possibilities. We eliminate some reading as impractical  or tangential or simply being more of the same. While books and theses can have extended discussions of literatures, many journal articles have economical literatures sections where only those texts most germane to the study are dealt with. Either way, our choice of literatures guides and frames what we will do and can say as a result.

Theoretical or conceptual framing – not all research has an explicit theoretical or conceptual frame but choosing one has consequences for what we see and don’t see, say and don’t say and how. We always have to write about this, we need to explain and justify our particular theoretical/conceptual choices and acknowledge how they shape what we do/have done.

Research design – by the time researchers come to design, they generally  already have made some decisions which shape their choices.  What we do in our research and how we do it is framed by the ways we have understood the problem, defined terms, worded objectives and so on. But there are further design choices to make which include the position we take on the topic, our choice of methodology and our choice of methods. The tradition of research we work within has implications for what we do and how we do it. Where we research, with whom, when, where and how often governs what we can say at the end of the project. How we choose to analyse our data is also important and guides what it is that we can say at the end. All design decisions have to be made explicit and explained  – our writing has to explain what we have done and why and how we can actually answer our research question (s) in ways that are credible.

Ethical practice – while we might want to do some things, we may not be able to do so because it could potentially harm participants. Considerations about how to conduct research are always an ongoing concern, and we need to make issues that we have had to think about clear to readers in our writing.

The writing – how we present the research as a text . We make textual choices about a load of things including how to communicate our analysis, our results. We choose particular data to evidence what we want to argue. And we signal in our analytic writing the nature of the data we are using, and how it stacks up compared to the whole mountain of stuff that we could potentially use. Most researchers find themselves having to make difficult decisions about what to leave out of a text rather than be worried about not having enough stuff. Textual decisions are also woven into our writing.

You can see from this list – and bear in mind that this is not all that is involved in establishing boundaries around our research- that there are some key issues here for all researchers:

1.  We need to focus very carefully on the choices we make

2.  We have to justify the decisions we take

3. We need to not only keep careful track of choices, but also the alternatives we considered but didn’t take up, and any knock-on effects.

Reporting on our choices and their implications and effects is an integral aspect of what makes our research trustworthy. It is integral to research reflexivity – thinking about what you do and what happens as a result.

You may have clocked that I’ve been talking about choice, decisions and consequences. Not limitations. The next post talks more about where and how we write these in our research texts. And why the term limitations is, well, limited and limiting.