1. Research
Methods 101
By Elliott Hedman
Part of Festival of Learning

2. Findings before research
methods

3. Findings After Research
Methods

4. Outline
 Am I doing Human Research?
 Getting Started
 Conducting
 Evaluation
 Practicals
 Questions/Case Studies

5. Warnings
 I am not Traditional, I am Media Lab
 I care a lot about inspiring design.
 I work a lot with companies.
 You will not learn the things I am about to
tell you in any class. In fact, many, many
people will disagree with me.
 There is not one right way. The wrong way
would be not caring.

6. Am I doing
research?
Art Research

7. Am I doing
Research
Mechanical/Engineering
Research

8. Am I doing
Research?
Product Design

9. Am I doing
Research?
Human Research

10. Mixing Them Up

11. Getting Started
Grounded Theory
Community
A Way To Observe

12. Grounded Theory
Read the literature
Talk to Major Players
Expand the Wheel

13. Community
Live with them
Get outside the lab
Copy previously done research

14. Ways to Observe
How will I learn?

15. How to do AWESOME
Research
The Right Question
Start Early
Prototype
Participatory Design
The Lots of Data Problem

16. Choosing the
Right Question
What’s the big vision?
What do you love doing?
Play.

17. Start Early
Space Allows Creativity
Technology Overload Problem

18. Prototype
Fail Early, Fail Often
Make a New Prototype Every Day
Myth of Rigor

19. Participatory
Design
The final judge is the people
who care
Communities will inspire you

20. Too Much Data
Lots of Data is not a band-aid
Different than learning as you
go.

21. Evaluation
The Dangers of Machine Learning
The Dangers of Quantitative Methods
The Dangers of Qualitative Methods

22. Machine
Learning
Machine Learning shows whether
you can separate two parts of
data.
You need to know a lot of
statistics to appropriately use this
in research.

23. Quantitative Methods
 Sampling
 http://onlinestatbook.com/2/introduction/s
ampling_demo.html

24. Quantitative Methods
 Variability
 http://onlinestatbook.com/2/summarizing_
distributions/spread_sim.html

25. Quantitative Methods
 Correlations
 http://onlinestatbook.com/2/describing_biv
ariate_data/pearson_demo.html

26. Quantitative Methods
 T-Test
 Do the Means Differ?
 Are people more self-aware working with
a robot?

27. Quantitative Methods
 Regression Analysis or ANOVA
 Do the Means Differ taking into account X,
Y, and Z.
 Are people more self-aware working with
a robot taking into account gender,
personality type, and financial income?

28. Quantitative Methods
 Correlations
 When X changes, does Y change as well
 Does the larger the robot correlate to the
more self-aware a person is?

29. Quantitative Methods
Warning!
 P<0.05 - the means may be different
 Does not equate to the differences are
large or interesting
 Most people already have an answer
before they ask their question
 Does not allow for discovery.

30. Quantitative Methods
Warning! Part 2
 Normal Distribution
 Hidden Variables
 Independent Samples
 Proper Sample Size
 Number of Tests
 Transformations
 Within or Across

31. Qualitative Methods
 Tell People What you Really Learned
 Open Ended – Let the world come in
 Descriptive
 Flexible

32. Qualitative Methods
 Short Interviews / Surveys
 Did you feel more self-aware after working
with the robots?
 Create biases
 Acceptable in journal?

33.  Long-Interviews
 1 to 1.5 hours
 Open-Ended
 Interpretation
Difficult and
Long

34.  Observational
Methods
 Fly on the Wall
 See what people
naturally do

35. Grounded Theory
Qualitative Methods require
strong grounded theory

36. Warnings
Traditional Ethnography is near
impossible to do in the Media
Lab
Interviews are more difficult to
conduct correctly and take a
longer time than statistics
Cannot answer questions
about how frequent an event
occurs.
Will it get accepted?

37. Warnings Part 2
Grounded Theory
1. Transcribe all the important
interviews
2. Write field-notes about
each of your interviews.
3. Go through all the
transcriptions and highlight
every time a theme occurs.
4. Relate findings to previous
established theory about
that theme.
5. Go back through all the
notes again.

38. It’s Great to Fail!
You are here to learn and try!
But make sure you try!

39. Resources to Check Out

40. Quantitative Books
 Cohen & Lea (2004). Essentials of Statistics for
the Social and Behavioral Sciences. New
Jersey:
 Wiley & Kline (2009). Becoming a Behavioral
Science Researcher: A Guide to Producing
Research That Matters. New York: Guilford
Press.
 Lane, D., Lu, J., Peres, C &. Zitek, E (2008).
Online Statistics: An Interactive Multimedia
Course ofStudy. http://onlinestatbook.com/

41. Qualitative Books
 Luker, Kristin. (2008). Salsa Dancing into
the Social Sciences: Research in an age
of info-glut
 Emerson, Robert (1995). Writing
Ethnographic Field Notes.

42. People
 Statistics: Benj. Mako Hill
 Qualitative: Karen Brennan, Tiffany Tseng
 Industrial/Design Research: Elliott Hedman

43. Quantitative Classes
 ANOVA statistics with M.L. Cummings
 Engineering Systems, MIT
 Empirical Methods 1 and II (API-202A)
 Make sure to do the A class
 Kenedy School of Government, Harvard
 Harvard School of Education
 Lots of Good APPLIED classes
 Do PhD Level

44. Qualitative Classes
 21A.760J Qualitative Research Methods
 Difficult to get into
 Must have strong Grounded Theory
 Harvard School of Education
 MIT School of Architecture

45. Methods Class
 21A.861 Methods for Graduate Research
in the Social Sciences
 Psychology 1901a - Methods of Behavioral
Research
 Harvard Psychology

46. Questions and Case Studies
 Feel Free to Reach Out With Questions:
 hedman@media.mit.edu