Research Methods

I am supervising several last-year PhD students this year, and they all have to write a methodology chapter for their thesis. Remember that a methodology chapter is not a methods chapter. While “method” is how you do something, “methodology” is the knowledge (“logy”) of the methods. Still, that requires that you can name your methods and reflect on them. Given that music technologists often work on method development (and related tools) as their core research activity, I see many struggle to describe and reflect on the methods they use. Hence, this little blog post to help people along the way. ...

Reading the latest issue of the Norwegian researcher’s magazine Forskerforum, I learned about PICO as an alternative model to the often used IMRAD approach to scientific writing. To summarize: IMRAD = Introduction, Method, research and Discussion PICO = Problem, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome It seems like PICO comes from clinical practice in medicine. Not sure if this helps music research that much, but I do like the structured approach to organising paper writing.