Thinking Like a Researcher

How researchers think

Conducting good research requires retraining your brain to think like a researcher. This requires visualising the abstract from actual observations, mentally ‘connecting the dots’ to identify hidden concepts and patterns, and synthesising those patterns into generalisable laws and theories that apply to other contexts beyond the domain of the initial observations. Research involves constantly moving back and forth from an empirical plane where observations are conducted to a theoretical plane where these observations are abstracted into generalizable laws and theories. This is a skill that takes many years to develop, is not something that is taught in postgraduate or doctoral programs or acquired in industry training. Some of the mental abstractions needed to think like a researcher include unit of analysis, constructs, hypotheses, operationalisation, theories, models and so forth, which we will examine in this chapter.