Dear esteemed colleagues,
I would love to hear your thoughts or opinions on the following statements posted. Thank you very much in advance
Example statement
1). Launching a research study to study why doing something as now become a cultural phenomenon.
OR
2). Launching a research study to study if doing something as now become a cultural phenomenon.
I am of the train of thought that with statement 1, there is an existence of a cultural phenomenon due to previous extant literature and this research study wants to study why this is the case as opposed to statement 2 which the study wants to study if there is one (Yes or No)
Yes, statement 1 supposes there exists a certain cultural phenomenon and proposes to study reasons for it; statement 2 proposes to determine whether such a cultural phenomenon exists at all. But in what sense is existence "due to literature"? Is the cultural phenomenon in question a literary phenomenon? Or are you referring to research articles (the "research literature") that alleges there is a cultural phenomenon? In the latter case, the existence may not be "due to literature" unless the research literature has itself become like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yes, statement 1 supposes there exists a certain cultural phenomenon and proposes to study reasons for it; statement 2 proposes to determine whether such a cultural phenomenon exists at all. But in what sense is existence "due to literature"? Is the cultural phenomenon in question a literary phenomenon? Or are you referring to research articles (the "research literature") that alleges there is a cultural phenomenon? In the latter case, the existence may not be "due to literature" unless the research literature has itself become like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thank you very much Dr. Pfeifer for your answer to my question. It is very much appreciated.
To answer your question, what I meant by existence due to literature review is that the the cultural phenomenon is known to be out there in other fields but there has been no research study done to find out why or to study the reasons why it is happening in the area I would like to work on
This is an interesting question and I agree that a "Why" question basically assumes that a certain phenomenon exists. To me, this is more or less the difference between exploratory and explanatory research. In the first one, you basically investigate a field from scratch and in the second one you try to explain a certain phenomenon. The latter can be problematic, for example, when one confuses correlation with causation and assumes a (spurious) relationship to be a causal one.
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