What Research Actually Is

There is a version of research that consists of finding things out. You have a question; you locate the answer; you record it. This is useful. It is also not what serious research is.

Serious research is the process of discovering what question you should have been asking.

Most commissioned research begins with a brief. The brief specifies the question. The researcher goes away and answers it. The client receives a document that confirms, complicates, or refutes the original hypothesis.

This is a reasonable process. It is also structurally limited, because the brief was written before anyone knew what the research would find. The question was formed in ignorance of the answer. And yet the answer is expected to fit the question.

The best research I have seen — and the best I have done — involves a moment, usually about two-thirds of the way through, where the original question is quietly set aside. Not abandoned. Set aside. Because something more interesting has emerged from the material, and following it will produce something truer than answering the brief.

There is a related confusion between sources and conclusions. A well-sourced document is not necessarily a well-argued one. Sources are evidence. Evidence requires interpretation. Interpretation requires a point of view.

The point of view is the thing most institutional research is designed to suppress. It introduces subjectivity, which introduces liability, which makes clients nervous. So the research becomes a list of findings, carefully attributed, carefully hedged, carefully useless.

The studio's position is the opposite. Sources matter. Attribution matters. But the value of research is the argument it makes possible — not the footnotes it accumulates.

Good research produces a claim. A specific, defensible, interesting claim about how something works, why something happened, or what something means. The claim should be surprising enough to be worth making and grounded enough to withstand challenge.

Everything else — the sources, the methodology, the caveats — exists to support the claim. Not to replace it.

If you finish a piece of research and cannot state the claim in a single sentence, the research is not finished.