Category: 1. Research

  • Evaluation of Theories vs. Validation of Hypotheses

    Research should be presented with appropriate choice of words to the world. So it bugs me if researchers, maybe unknowingly, overreach and call the evaluation of a theory a validation thereof. I don’t think you can ever fully validate a theory, you can only validate individual hypotheses. The following figure shows how I think key…

  • MECE Translated: Überlappungsfrei und Erschöpfend

    When teaching about modeling the world, I often talk about how concepts should be MECE, that is, mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. I didn’t invent this acronym, I took it from Barbara Minto’s writings about structured reasoning. I finally figured out the appropriate German translation, and, oh wonder, it is shorter than the English version.…

  • Is Exploratory Data Analysis Bad?

    Last weekend, I ventured into unchartered territory (for me) and attended the Berliner Methodentreffen, a research conference mostly frequented by social scientists. I participated in a workshop on mixed methods, where the presenter discussed different models of mixing methods with each other (“Methodenpluralität” in German). She omitted one model that I thought is often used:…

  • We May not Know What We are Doing…

    From my excursion into qualitative research land (the aforementioned Berliner Methodentreffen) I took away some rather confusing impressions about the variety of what people consider science. I’m well aware of different philosophies of science (from positivism to radical constructivism) and their impact on research methodology (from controlled experiments to action research, ethnographies, etc.) I did…

  • On the Importance of an Open Standard Exchange Format for QDA Projects

    I just returned from the Berliner Methodentreffen. One of the initiatives that was most interesting to me is a new attempt at agreeing on and standardizing an open exchange format for qualitative data analysis projects between the different QDA tools. As of today, it is not possible to take your data from one vendor’s tool…

  • Why You Should Ask for Money When Working With Industry

    In our research, we often work with industry. In software engineering research, this is a no-brainer: Industry is, where there the research data is. That’s why we go there. For many research questions, we cannot create adequately, in a laboratory setting, a situation that lets us do our research. Once a researcher realizes this, they…