FRAMING YOUR RESEARCH

Boston College will be your hosts for this event. Please save the date: June 5th. The time of the Meeting will be somewhere in the range of 2:00-8:00 p.m. (Dinner included)

For this Meeting, we will be focusing on how you frame your research, especially inductive field research. Framing such research often faces some difficult barrier

• Reviewers of manuscripts often ask for a lot of theory up front, but the theory you need to frame your paper may have emerged from your study – so how can you avoid sounding too deductive? … and how can you avoid ruining your “punch line?”
• Field research is often problem-centered and thus involves interweaving multiple theoretical perspectives – so how do you make it sound coherent?... how do you figure out which theories to include and which you can leave out? … and how can you be both comprehensive but leave space for your own contribution?
• Field research often focuses on nontraditional contexts or topics –so how do you frame your paper in such a way that people will want to read it?

As with our last conference, there will be a “price of admission.” This year it will be bringing a 2-3 page introduction of a paper that you are writing that will be shared with others.