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A friend of mine always asks if I’m behaving, and I always say yes. Whether I’m behaving well or badly is another question. Everyone does research. You do research. Do you do it well or badly?

Research comes in all shapes and sizes. Take medical research, for example.

Some people work to discover new drugs. Anyone can see that’s research. Doctors read all kinds of information about drugs to know which ones to prescribe for your condition. They might not think of it as research, but it is.

You get your medicine and want to know something more than what’s in the documents the pharmacist gave you. So you look at some web sites to find out more about it. That’s research, too.

You did your first research project in grade school. You looked up articles in an encyclopedia and summarized what you found there in your own words. When you got to high school, you had to read more for your papers, and they wouldn’t let you use the encyclopedia any more.

In your science classes, you did experiments and projects. That’s research, too. You had to study the textbook first, though. Research begins with reading. The more momentous the research, the more the researcher has to read before doing anything else.

The research process has five basic steps.

1. Define a problem to solve or question to answer.
2. Plan a strategy for finding the solution or answer.
3. Collect information.
4. Analyze and interpret the information.
5. Report the findings.

Some examples of bad research

Say you want to buy a mattress and get a coupon for a sale at a particular store. If you know you want the mattress, you have defined a problem.

If you take that coupon to that store and buy whatever the salesperson talks you into. . .

Well, let’s just say I’ve been sleeping on my mistake for a while. I didn’t plan a strategy. The only information I collected was what came in the mail. Of course, I lay on the mattress in the store, but not for eight hours!

I read once about a college student who sat in the library calling friends on his cell phone asking how to find information for a term paper. He was within earshot of the reference desk, but consistently refused librarians’ offer of help. Now, polling is a way of collecting information. It can be an important part of certain research projects.

Asking people for help who don’t know how to help and not accepting it from people who do know how is doing research badly.

A college freshman told a magazine reporter about his enthusiasm for electronic books. He said it’s much easier to go in and find the information you want. Reading a print book, he said, takes too long.

Actually, if a printed book has an index, it’s as easy to cherry pick the facts you know you want as with an electronic book. If that’s all you do, you’re doing research badly. As you read more widely, you will frequently find information you didn’t know you needed until you found it. Perhaps it will cause you to redefine your problem or strategy.

An example of successful personal research

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When I was in graduate school, one of my roommates came back from a visit to his father with a pear pie. It was delicious. I have never seen a pear pie in any pie shop since. So here’s a problem: How can I have another pear pie?

The obvious strategy is to bake my own. I’m an accomplished cook, so I can do that. Someone else might adopt a strategy of finding someone else to bake one.

Baking a pie seems a good example of research, simply because the process of cooking and research are so much alike. A recipe resembles a research strategy. I have to collect all the ingredients and equipment—analogous to collecting information.

I can’t just jumble all the ingredients together and expect to have a pie. For my professional research, in music history, I have to collect my information and then analyze the see what new insights it has. Analysis means, in part, taking something apart. To make a pie, I have to make some changes to my ingredients, such as peeling and cutting the pears. Measuring means separating the right amount of some ingredient from the package.

In research, sometimes, I might get a result I expected. Sometimes I might find some mistakes in some original assumptions. Sometimes I might find that I need to collect more information. Whatever I find from my analysis, I have to put everything back together in a new way in order to report my findings.

So I peeled, chopped, measured, combined, and put everything in the pie pan. I immediately wished I had used either fewer pears or a deep-dish pie pan. Then I put it in the oven to turn all those ingredients into a pie.

 The conclusion of research

I had to read some material on research to prepare this post. All the authors said that the last step is reporting the findings, but they’re assuming more formal research than I am.

Whether the research is that third-grade study of bats, that oral report in high school, or something a chemist does that I can’t even spell, reporting means telling someone else. For personal research, we may have to use it loosely.

What about the pie? I ate it. As long as I’m using it as an analogy for research, I can report it was very good. My next one was even better. But no one really has to know but me.

If your research is buying a mattress, you don’t have to write anything. Unless you mention it in a Facebook post or something.

Your research on your medicine might involve another conversation with your doctor. Or it just might let you take your pill with more confidence.

You need report your conclusions only to yourself, in these cases. But you have finished your research.  And if you have carefully followed the first four steps, you have done it well.