See the course Canvas for university policies, course polices, and link to “course sandbox” — our collaboration space. Version: Spring 2025

Summary

Welcome to Research Methods, an undergraduate course at the University of South Florida. The course aims to strengthen students critical literacy competencies and to provide students with the knowledge and competencies they need to to understand how to engage in research to solve practical problems, to generate novel ideas, and to develop new products, apps, and services. Students learn to be a critical consumer of information —  to assess the authority of research studies, especially knowledge and truth claims. They learn knowledge of research methods is a form of power, especially knowledge of Creative Methods, Design Research Methods, Qualitative Research Methods, Quantitative Research Methods, Mixed Research Methods, Scholarly Research Methods. 

Students in this section of Research Methods critique peer-reviewed research studies published in journals—such as those in Technical Communication, Experience Design, and Business/Professional and Technical Communication—selected from a list curated by Jason Tham, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University.

​This course is designed to be adaptable for various student groups while maintaining its emphasis on foundational research competencies, including rhetorical analysis, genre analysis, citation analysis, and information literacy. For instance, literature faculty might guide students to perform close readings of articles from literary criticism journals such as PMLA or The Journal of Modern Literature. Similarly, creative writing faculty could provide students with a curated list of literary journals and magazines, such as The Kenyon Review and Granta, to analyze contemporary creative works. This approach ensures that students engage with discipline-specific materials, enhancing their analytical skills and understanding within their respective fields.

Why Does this Course Matter?

After symbolic thinking—the ability to think, create, and interpret symbols to communicate with others—being capable of engaging in research is a major human trait.

Research — whether informal, formal, applied, or basic — enables us to solve problems, develop new products, apps, and services.

Research enables

• Creatives to channel their inner voice, weaving fiction and nonfiction from intuition and experience.
  • A novelist crafting a dystopian future might draw inspiration from climate change reports, while a documentary filmmaker capturing life in Tokyo might combine personal interviews with archival footage to create a compelling narrative. (More on Creative Methods)
• Designers to prototype and refine, transforming insights from customer discovery into innovative solutions.
  • A UX researcher designing an app might conduct usability studies with diverse participants to evaluate how intuitive the interface is. An industrial designer creating an ergonomic chair might use 3D modeling and rapid prototyping to test multiple versions before selecting a final design. (More on Design Research Methods)
• Empiricists to make observations of the material world.
  • A social scientist studying consumer behavior might analyze purchasing trends across different demographics to determine how income levels influence spending habits. A climate scientist tracking global temperatures might collect satellite data over decades to assess the impact of carbon emissions on climate change. (More on Empirical Research Methods)
• Integrators to bridge disciplines, forging new frameworks from seemingly disconnected ideas.
  • A public health researcher studying vaccine hesitancy might combine survey data on vaccination rates with in-depth interviews to understand personal beliefs and social influences. An education researcher evaluating a new teaching method might track student test scores while also conducting classroom observations to assess engagement levels. (More on Mixed Research Methods)
• Interpreters to decode meaning, uncovering the layers beneath words, symbols, and actions.
  • An anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Guatemala might observe and document local rituals, interviewing residents to understand how traditions shape social identity. A sociologist researching urban gentrification in New York City might conduct in-depth case studies with longtime residents, tracking changes in housing policies and neighborhood demographics. (More on Qualitative Research Methods)
• Scholars to ignite debates, refining interpretations and shaping intellectual landscapes.
  • A philosopher examining the ethics of AI might deconstruct arguments about human agency, while a historian studying Renaissance Italy might analyze letters and diaries to challenge existing narratives about political power and influence. (More on Scholarly Research Methods)
• Scientists to conduct controlled experiments, systematically manipulating variables and using control groups to identify causal relationships.
  • A medical researcher testing a new vaccine might administer the vaccine to one group while giving a placebo to another, measuring differences in infection rates. A physicist studying motion might drop objects of different masses in a vacuum to test gravitational acceleration. (More on Quantitative Research Methods)

Over time, the collective efforts of researchers across methodologies form what scholars have called the “conversation of humankind”—historically referenced as the “conversation of mankind” (Oakeshott, 1962)—a continuous dialogue through which knowledge is constructed, debated, and revised. It is through this ever-evolving exchange that humanity not only understands the world but transforms it.

Research Competencies Protect You from Misinformation

Yet there are obstacles to both consuming and creating research. Like other human matters, research is not an objective act, but a subjective one, at least for every methodological community other than the scientists.

The gamification of public discourse and the rise of AI-generated misinformation have fractured our sense of shared reality. Large language models, trained on vast but often flawed datasets, can fabricate sources, distort scientific findings, and flood the information ecosystem with narratives that feel persuasive but lack verification. This is compounded by political leaders and corporate interests who manipulate or suppress research to serve ideological or economic agendas. As Jon Askonas (2022) argues, reality itself is now experienced like a game—where people “score points” by reinforcing the narratives of their chosen ideological teams, rather than engaging in genuine inquiry.

Perhaps research has always been broken, subject to sophistry — the pursuit of persuasion over truth. Yet now, thanks to the rise of AI, it could be argued that being capable of accurately interpret peer-reviewed research is critical so survival in the information age.

Grounding claims in evidence supported by rigorous research is essential for making informed decisions and shaping responsible policies. Both researchers and consumers of information must be able to discern methodological errors, ethical lapses, and the misrepresentation of data.

The importance of information literacy competencies is underscored by the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the 26th Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has repeatedly dismissed peer-reviewed research on vaccines, instead promoting debunked claims, including the false link between vaccines and autism. He has referred to vaccines as a “holocaust,” claimed COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” and suggested that chemicals in tap water alter children’s gender identities. These unfounded assertions have fueled vaccine hesitancy, contributing to public health risks.

On the very day Kennedy was sworn into office, Texas experienced a significant measles outbreak, with at least 24 reported cases—22 children and two adults—all unvaccinated. Nine individuals required hospitalization. Measles, once nearly eradicated, is now resurging in part due to the spread of misinformation by anti-vaccine advocates. This outbreak, coupled with Kennedy’s controversial statements, underscores the urgent need to critically evaluate evidence, combat the spread of misinformation, and ensure that public health policies are grounded in rigorous, peer-reviewed research.

In an era where misinformation spreads at unprecedented speed and political discourse is increasingly untethered from reality, the ability to conduct research or to distinguish autohoritatibe research from sophistry is not just an academic skill—it is a fundamental tool of self-defense. Without the ability to critically evaluate sources, fact-check claims, and distinguish between credible research and ideological distortion, individuals risk becoming passive consumers of propaganda. Whether confronting AI-generated misinformation, politically motivated historical revisionism, or corporate-driven disinformation campaigns, your capacity to engage in rigorous research determines whether you participate in the conversation of humankind as an informed thinker or as an unwitting player in someone else’s narrative.

[ More on Misinformation ]

Knowledge of Research Methods Empowers You to Create New Knowledge, Products, Services

To excel as a researcher, you need to have a growth mindset, be intellectually open, be ready to dig into a problem space, engage in strategic search, consider counterarguments, and assess the best methods for understanding a phenomenon or designing a process or service. Researchers need

• to posses the necessary drive, the self regulation, to engage in robustly in writing and creative processes
• to understand the epistemologies that inform research methods, such as Expressivism, Constructivism, Hermeneutics, Positivism, or Post-Positivism
• to be capable of engaging in rhetorical reasoning (especially rhetorical analysis, textual analysis, and citation analysis) to ascertain
  • the genres of particular research communities (annotated bibliographies, research studies, ethnograpies, case studies, surveys, pitches, presentations, literature reviews, or recommendation reports
  • the rhetorical moves and discourse conventions research communities (e.g., The Creatives, The Designers, The Interpreters, The Scientists, The Synthesizers, The Scholars) expect them to employ in order to develop or test knowledge claims — or create new products and processes: Research Question, Literature Review, Methods, Results, and Conclusions sections of research studies
• to understand the information literacy conventions that inform the interpretation and production of meaning, especially how to critically evaluate information
• be aware of the different methods knowledge workers use to create new knowledges, products, or services, including
  • Creative Methods
  • Design Research Methods
  • Empirical Research Methods
    • Qualitative Research Methods
    • Quantitative Research Methods
    • Mixed Research Methods
  • Scholarly Research Methods
• be capable of communicating in the writing style expected by the audience (e.g., an academic writing style or a professional writing style). To attract readers, they must present the research question, literature review, results, and conclusions with clarity, brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity 

Student Learning Outcomes

Research methods represent a complex set of skills that often begin in undergraduate study and deepen through graduate programs or professional practice. While no single course can cover every possible approach, this course will prepare you to conduct

• Audience Awareness
  • Understand how methodological communities define and develop knowledge within their respective fields
    • The Creatives
    • The Designers
    • The Empiricists
      • The Interpreters
      • The Scientists
    • The Synthesizers
    • The Scholars
• Genre Analysis
  Analyze Genres and Conventions
  • Gain understanding of the genres and research conventions of methodological communities, including the research question, literature review, citation conventions, methods, results, and conclusions
• Rhetorical Analysis
  • evaluate how researchers across disciplines construct arguments through rhetorical appeals, discourse conventions, and citation practices
• Citation Analysis
  • understand APA citation conventions, ensuring proper attribution and scholarly and academic integrity
• Epistemological Analysis
  • Understand that different Methodological Communities – Research Communities (e.g., The Creatives, The Designers, The Empiricists, The Interpreters, The Scientists, The Synthesizers, The Scholars) draw on distinct epistemologies to shape their inquiry, findings, applications, interpretations, and arguments
• Methodological Critique
  • Understand the research methods of research studies published in PTC journals
  • distinguish valid, evidence-based findings from opinion, bias, and unsupported claims using critical reading strategies.
  • Be capable of identifying methodological flaws within and across research methods. Learn how to evaluate whether a research study’s claims are credible and grounded in evidence recognized by its respective community.

Scope

As discussed above, this course offers a survey of research methods. The major course assignments focus on Genre Analysis, Rhetorical Analysis, textual, and Citation Analysis. Students get a good introduction to common pitfalls across and within methods, yet they do not have extensive experience with of the methods we cover. Treatment of quantitative empirical and mixed research methods is superficial, limited mostly to reviewing published research studies.

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Participation Assignments

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Typically, participation assignments are drafts of creative challenges due later in the day. Sometimes, though, they are reading quizzes or exercises intended to scaffold the competencies required to complete a creative challenge. You will earn one course-participation credit by participating in each meeting, and you need to be present in the Teams Meeting to earn credit. If you miss an assignment, it will count as an absence per the labor-based grading policy. See Canvas for more details on the participation assignments.

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Creative Challenges

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Rhetorical Analysis of PTC Research Journals – An Introduction to the Topics, Audiences, and Research Conventions of a Scholarly and Professional Community

This assignment introduces students to the professional and scholarly communities that shape research in the field of professional and technical communication (PTC). Rather than analyzing individual studies, students examine the journals themselves—who publishes them, the kinds of topics and research questions they prioritize, and the genre conventions they expect contributors to follow. This early rhetorical analysis helps students understand how methodological communities define what counts as knowledge, what problems matter, and how evidence should be presented. In doing so, students begin to tune their ear to the ongoing scholarly conversation—what Kenneth Burke called the “unending conversation of humankind”—and learn how to enter it with clarity and purpose.

Design Thinking – Visualizing How Epistemologies Shape the Research Practices of Methodological Communities Research

This assignment asks students to visualize the epistemological assumptions and research methods that inform the research efforts of The Creatives, The Designers, The Interpreters (Qualitative Researchers), The Scientists (Quantitative Empiricists), The Synthesizers (Mixed Methods Researchers).

This goal of this challenge is to introduce students to the epistemologies and methodological communities that inform major research methods, especially

• Creative Methods
• Design Research Methods
• Empirical Research Methods
  • Qualitative Research Methods
  • Quantitative Research Methods
  • Mixed Research Methods
• Scholarly Research Methods

Topics include also include design principles and data visualization. (More)

Genre Analysis of Research Questions, Literature Reviews, and Citation Practices

This assignment introduces students to how The Creatives, The Designers, The Interpreters (Qualitative Researchers), The Scientists (Quantitative Empiricists), The Synthesizers (Mixed Methods Researchers), The Scholars (Textual Researchers) frame research questions, literature reviews, and citations. Students engage in rhetorical analysis, genre analysis, and citation analysis of three research studies published in a PTC journal. Working individually, they analyze the rhetorical situation for each article, assessing who publishes the articles and who reads the articles — i.e, which methodological communities the journals and authors invoke and their epistemological assumptions. They engage in genre analysis, studying the discourse and rhetorical moves of these communities, especially how they craft research questions, literature reviews, and citation practices. Topics also include Information Literacy and Citation. (More)

Methodological Critique: Assessing Research Methods, Results, and Interpretations

Being able to assess the authority of a research study is a critical literacy—especially given the rise of predatory journals, which disguise themselves as rigorous, peer-reviewed publications but instead serve as marketing tools for products and services or as vehicles for ideological influence. While peer review is often seen as a mark of credibility, not all studies adhere to high methodological or ethical standards. Misaligned research questions and methods, flawed data collection, overgeneralization, and ethical lapses can lead to misleading conclusions that shape public policy, industry decisions, and academic discourse in problematic ways.

This creative challenge provides a framework for evaluating research integrity across Scholarly, Creative, Qualitative Empirical, Quantitative Empirical, Mixed Methods, and Design approaches. Students will examine both common methodological pitfalls—such as confirmation bias, misinterpretation of data, and failure to acknowledge the evolving nature of knowledge—and discipline-specific flaws that arise within different research traditions. (More)

Corpus Research Methods: What Research Methods and Epistemological Assumptions Inform Theory, Research and Scholarship in PTC?

This assignment challenges students to (1) collate the results of their genre analysis, rhetorical analysis, and citation analysis of research studies published in PTC journals; (2) collate their rhetorical analyses of journals in the PTC field; and (2) synthesize that work in order to develop evidence-based conclusions about

1. the topics PTC scholars and researchers are currently pursuing as of 2025
2. the journals published by the PTC community
3. the genre conventions PTC investigators follow, particularly how they frame research questions, literature reviews, and citations
4. The prevalence of particular methodological communities, especially  The Creatives, The Designers, The Interpreters, The Scientists, The Synthesizers (Mixed Methods Researchers), The Scholars (Textual Researchers).
5. the prevalence of particular research methods, particularly Creative Methods, Design Research Methods, Empirical Research Methods, Qualitative Research Methods, Quantitative Research Methods, Mixed Research Methods, and Scholarly Research Methods. (More)
6. The different epistemological assumptions that guide the work of methodological communities, particularly aesthetic and expressive epistemologies (Creatives), pragmatism and design thinking (Designers), interpretivism and constructivism (Interpreters – aka the Qualitative Researchers), positivism and post-positivism (Scientists), pragmatism and dialectical approaches (Synthesizers – aka Mixed-Methods Researchers), and hermeneutics, critical theory, and interpretivism (Scholars).

This final assignment provides students with a deeper understanding of research in PTC, equipping them to identify methodological strengths and weaknesses, anticipate emerging research trends, and critically engage with evolving research practices. (More)

FAQs

In order to clarify why a course on research methods is important, we first need to define terms. Below is a summary of terms, which is followed by the major writing assignments for the course. For instructor info and policies — and the link to the course sandbox, see Canvas.

What is Research?

Research refers to a systematic investigation carried out to discover new knowledge, test existing knowledge claims, solve practical problems, and develop new products, apps, and services. (More)

What is Professional Writing?

Professional and Technical Communication is an academic field that focuses on creating clear, effective, and usable information for specific audiences in workplace and public settings. It involves researching, writing, designing, and delivering complex information across various media to help users understand and act on that information.

Professional Writing — a term used synonymously with workplace writing or technical writing — may also refer to

1. communication that accomplishes job-related tasks
2. a style of writing that emphasizes information visualizations, visual language, design thinking, scanability, information design and architecture, deductive organization and reasoning, as well as clarity in communications and the practice of   brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity
3. an academic discipline, a community of practice (aka discourse community), concerned with the study of writing, document design, the usability of documents and products, and project management in workplace contexts.
4. an undergraduate writing course at the University of South Florida, ENC 3250

Who Are Professional and Technical Communicators?

Professional and technical writers are subject matter experts in writing, design, usability, information architecture, documentation, project management, and digital writing — including, e.g., remediating texts in multiple media, printed posters to Tweets.

They are researchers and communicators who investigate, create, and deliver clear, accessible content for diverse audiences across industries such as technology, healthcare, finance, and government. As researchers, professional and technical writers may investigate user behaviors, analyze document effectiveness, conduct literature reviews, or explore new communication technologies. They often collaborate with subject matter experts outside of their field, serving as writing coaches, editors, and project managers who engage in research to enhance communication strategies and outcomes.

Professional writers may do the equivalent work of technical writers — and vice versa — but traditionally there are a few distinctions between these roles:

• Professional Writers are typically skilled writers, public speakers, and researchers. They often hold undergraduate or graduate degrees in fields such as rhetoric, composition, communication, design, and product management, though some acquire these competencies through on-the-job experience. These professionals may serve as writers or spokespersons on teams, bringing their communication expertise to various subject areas. Their work can be job-related or extend to public spaces, including social media platforms like Reddit, blogs, newspaper and magazine articles, and books.
• Technical Writers share many of the skills and credentials of Professional Communicators but tend to focus on complex, technical subjects in fields like technology, engineering, and science. While they may have similar academic backgrounds to professional writers, their work is typically more specialized. Unlike Professional Communicators who often address broad public audiences, Technical Writers primarily create content for specific, often specialized audiences in workplace settings. Their outputs include instructional materials, user manuals, product documentation, and technical reports, with an emphasis on clarity, accuracy, and usability of information.

What Are Research Methodologies?

Research Methodology refers to the philosophical framework, the epistemology that informs the research methods used in a research study. Researchers may use the same methods to investigate a research question and yet disagree with one another about the kind of knowledge the method produces. For instance, researchers could interview the same subjects and even ask the same questions, maybe even get the same answers, and yet have entirely different ideas about what the results mean. For the researcher contributing to a methodological community that favors positivism, the researcher may assume the interview reveals universal insights about human behavior that transcend time and place. In contrast, a researcher with more of a post-positivistic, subjectivist position might suggest the results are not generalizable, that the results are nothing more than one person’s point of view. (More)

What is the Difference Between Research Methods and Research Methodologies?

Researchers distinguish between research methods and methodologies:

• Research Methods are tools and techniques used to collect and analyze data. For example, an Interview or Survey may be referred to as a tool or technique.
• Research Methodologies are the justification a researcher provides for using particular methods. A researcher’s methodology is the rationale for using particular tools/methods. It is the philosophical framework, the epistemology that informs a research project.

In other words, methods can be compared to screwdrivers, hammers, nails, etc. while methodologies can be compared to the architectural plans for a building. Methods refer to how data is collected and methodologies refer to what the data mean (in the perspective of an investigator or methodological community.