Collecting Data on Your Own

Not all your supporting materials for an academic argument must come from print or online sources. You can present research that you have carried out or been closely involved with; this kind of research usually requires that you collect and examine data. Here, we discuss the kinds of firsthand research that student writers do most often.

Perform experiments. Academic arguments can be supported by evidence you gather through experiments. In the sciences, data from experiments conducted under rigorously controlled conditions is highly valued. For other kinds of writing, more informal experiments may be acceptable, especially if they’re intended to provide only part of the support for an argument.

If you want to argue, for instance, that the recipes in Bon Appétit magazine are impossibly tedious to follow and take far more time than the average person wishes to spend preparing food, you might ask five or six people to conduct an experiment — following two recipes from a recent issue and recording and timing every step. The evidence that you gather from this informal experiment could provide some concrete support — by way of specific examples — for your contention.

But such experiments should be taken with a grain of salt (maybe organic in this case). They may not be effective with certain audiences. And if your experiments can easily be attacked as skewed or sloppily done (“The people you asked to make these recipes couldn’t cook a Pop-Tart”), then they may do more harm than good.

Make observations. “What,” you may wonder, “could be easier than observing something?” You just choose a subject, look at it closely, and record what you see and hear. But trained observers say that recording an observation accurately requires intense concentration and mental agility. If observing were easy, all eyewitnesses would provide reliable stories. Yet experience shows that when several people observe the same phenomenon, they generally offer different, sometimes even contradictory, accounts of those observations.

Before you begin an observation yourself, decide exactly what you want to find out, and anticipate what you’re likely to see. Do you want to observe an action that is repeated by many people — perhaps how people behave at the checkout line in a grocery store? Or maybe you want to study a sequence of actions — for instance, the stages involved in student registration, which you want to argue is far too complicated. Or maybe you are motivated to examine the interactions of a notoriously contentious campus group. Once you have a clear sense of what you’ll analyze and what questions you’ll try to answer through the observation, use the following guidelines to achieve the best results:

You may be asked to prepare systematic observations in various science courses, including anthropology or psychology, where you would follow a methodology and receive precise directions. But observation can play a role in other kinds of arguments and use various media: a photo essay, for example, might serve as an academic argument in some situations.

Conduct interviews. Some evidence is best obtained through direct interviews. If you can talk with an expert — in person, on the phone, or online — you might obtain information you couldn’t have gotten through any other type of research. In addition to an expert opinion, you might ask for firsthand accounts, biographical information, or suggestions of other places to look or other people to consult. The following guidelines will help you conduct effective interviews:

A serious interview can be eye-opening when the questions get a subject to reveal important experiences or demonstrate his or her knowledge or wisdom.

Use questionnaires to conduct surveys. Surveys usually require the use of questionnaires. Questions should be clear, easy to understand, and designed so that respondents’ answers can be easily analyzed. Questions that ask respondents to say “yes” or “no” or to rank items on a scale (1 to 5, for example, or “most helpful” to “least helpful”) are particularly easy to tabulate. Because tabulation can take time and effort, limit the number of questions you ask. Note also that people often resent being asked to answer more than about twenty questions, especially online.

Here are some other guidelines to help you prepare for and carry out a survey:

Draw upon personal experience. Personal experience can serve as powerful evidence when it’s appropriate to the subject, to your purpose, and to the audience. If it’s your only evidence, however, personal experience usually won’t be sufficient to carry the argument. Your experiences may be regarded as merely “anecdotal,” which is to say possibly exceptional, unrepresentative, or even unreliable. Nevertheless, personal experience can be effective for drawing in listeners or readers, as James Parker does in the following example. His full article goes on to argue that — in spite of his personal experience with it — the “Twee revolution” has some good things going for it, including an “actual moral application”:

Eight years ago or so, the alternative paper I was working for sent me out to review a couple of folk-noise-psych-indie-beardie-weirdie bands. I had a dreadful night. The bands were bad enough — “fumbling,” I scratched in my notebook, “infantile” — but what really did me in was the audience. Instead of baying for the blood of these lightweights . . . the gathered young people — behatted, bebearded, besmiling — obliged them with patters of validating applause. I had seen it before, this fond curiosity, this acclamation of the undercooked, but never so much of it in one place: the whole event seemed to exult in its own half-bakedness. Be as crap as you like was the message to the performers. The crapper, the better. We’re here for you. I tottered home, wrote a homicidally nasty nervous breakdown of a review, and decided I should take myself out of circulation for a while. No more live reviews until I calmed down. A wave of Twee — as I now realize — had just broken over my head.

— James Parker, The Atlantic, July/August 2014, p. 36