Proper Research Methodology

One of the most basic fundamentals of any historically based practice is (or at least should be) proper research. Unfortunately “do your research” is one of those phrases people repeat constantly without any instruction as to how- or without having the faintest idea what proper research actually looks like to begin with.

Legitimate online research involves quite a bit more than spending ten seconds with Google, clicking the first result that agrees with you, and copying a handful of Wikipedia links into your notes. Research is called re-search for a reason. It requires patient repetition, careful filtering, a willingness to dig deeper, and the ability to separate drivel from genuinely verified information while maintaining a healthy amount of skepticism.

Most of the books in the world- and pages on the internet- are not worth quoting. Successfully sifting through all of that information requires consistent and reliable methods for filtering what you find. It requires enough patience to understand the full breadth of what has been written about a subject, and enough critical thinking to avoid simply believing something because someone somewhere put it on a webpage (or in an encyclopedia, even).

That does not mean you must approach every subject as though you are preparing a doctoral dissertation, of course. Sometimes you simply want to know what year something happened, or whether a particular recipe calls for three eggs or four. But when you are researching something you intend to understand deeply, teach to others, write about, practice, or use as the foundation for your beliefs, you owe it to yourself to take your research seriously.

1. Determine Your Subject

Start with a topic you would like to know more about. It does not particularly matter where you begin, or what the subject happens to be. The important thing is simply to begin somewhere.

Maybe you want to learn about historical housekeeping practices in the 1890's. Maybe you are trying to determine whether a particular "organic" cleaning method you read on a blog actually works. Maybe you first need to understand how homemakers in the 1920s stored food before you can sensibly recreate part of their household routine ... Pick something and go with it.

You do not need to know everything (or anything) about the subject before beginning your research. If you did, there wouldn't be any point in researching it in the first place. Curiosity is a perfectly good starting point, and sometimes the vaguest little question can lead you down a fascinating rabbit hole.

2. Determine Your Context

There is nothing wrong with broad research, mind you. But in all things, context matters. And so once you have chosen your general subject, before you begin gathering your information, think about the particular context in which you want to understand it.

Perhaps you want to know whether a particular historical cleaning method is still useful in a modern home. Perhaps you are interested specifically in homemaking during the 1920s. Maybe you are researching household routines from the 10th Century. Or perhaps you are trying to understand how rural families preserved food during the Great Depression.

Whatever you are researching, consider the cultural, geographical, historical, economic, or other framework that matters to your question. You may only be interested in one particular aspect of a much larger subject, and recognizing that from the beginning will help keep your research from wandering off into every hedge imaginable.

3. Begin with Preliminary Searches

Start with broad, initial research using platforms such as Internet Public Library, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, and even good old fashioned Google (we'll ignore the fact that it's hardly useful in finding anything these days). The purpose during this phase is not to immediately find the answer. Instead, you are trying to get a broad sense of what is out there to begin with. 

What categories exist around your subject? What related topics keep appearing? What names, terms, locations, dates, household practices, or technologies seem relevant? These preliminary searches will help give your research some direction. They can also provide useful keywords and phrases that you may not have thought to search for on your own.

4. Decide Whether You Need “Hard Research”, “Soft Research”, or Both

Once you have completed your preliminary searches, you should have a much better idea of what information exists and what keywords you need to use. This is where more advanced searching begins.

Advanced research can generally be divided into two broad categories: “Hard” research and “Soft” research. These two approaches have very different expectations concerning evidence and proof, and they often produce very different kinds of results. Because of this, they are better suited to different kinds of subjects.

Hard Research describes scientific and objective research, where proven facts, figures, statistics, and measurable evidence are absolutely critical. You will generally need publications by scholars, experts, and professionals with relevant credentials. An opinion blog simply will not do the job. 

The Invisible Web will often be important for hard research. Accordingly, possible content areas for a hard research topic include:

• Academic journals, including the various academic search engines available online.
• Government publications.
• Government authorities.
• Scientific and medical content.
• Non-government websites not influenced by advertising or obvious sponsorship.
• Archived news and other historical material, such as the Internet Archive.

This is the kind of research you may need when asking whether a household chemical is safe, whether a particular cleaning practice can damage a surface, how nutrition actually works, or whether a historical claim is genuinely supported by the evidence.

Soft Research, by contrast, describes subjects that are more subjective, cultural, experiential, or opinion-based. As a result. a person does not necessarily need a formal academic credential to have something worthwhile to say. Thus, research may involve the opinions of respected writers, homemakers, craftspeople, and other people with practical experience in a particular field. 

Soft research may include sources such as:

• Blogs, including personal homemaking blogs and amateur writer blogs.
• Forums and discussion sites where people share practical household experiences.
• Consumer product review sites.
• Commercial sites that are advertising-driven.
• Websites focused on specific topics, such as cooking, home repair, or other skills.

The important distinction is that soft research is not necessarily bad research. It simply has different expectations attached to it. If you are trying to understand how homemakers actually use a particular cleaning routine in their daily lives, for example, personal accounts and discussions may be far more useful than a collection of statistics.

Combined Hard and Soft Research, though, requires the most work because these hybrid subjects broaden your search requirements considerably. Not only do you need to find reliable facts and figures, but you may also need to engage with anecdotes and opinions in order to make sense of the subject.

Homemaking history can be an excellent example of this hybrid research type. You may need historical documents to understand what household technologies existed; scientific sources to understand whether an old cleaning method is safe or effective; and personal diaries, magazines, letters, or memoirs to understand how ordinary women actually lived and used those things.

You may need the statistics and the human experience. The official records and the criticism of those records. The historical evidence and an understanding of how people actually behaved within the limits of their ordinary lives; a complicated subject usually requires a willingness to look at more than one kind of information.

Use a Variety of Different Sources: A fully informed view should take different perspectives into account. This does not mean that every perspective will ultimately prove equally accurate, reasonable, or useful. Some arguments are better than others. Some sources are simply wrong. But you cannot intelligently evaluate competing claims if you deliberately refuse to look at what other people are saying, too.

Whenever possible, prefer primary sources: A modern opinion about the past is not the same thing as evidence from the past. Do not build your understanding on a game of historical telephone. If you are trying to understand what people actually wrote, believed, used, purchased, cooked, cleaned, or experienced, get as close to the original source as you reasonably can; a personal diary from a homemaker in 1932 is generally more useful for understanding her actual daily life than a modern blogger summarizing what she believes women did during the Great Depression.

5. Figure Out Where to Search

Once you have gathered enough preliminary information to understand your subject and what you need more clearly, begin narrowing and deepening your searches. Remember, however, that different tools are better at finding different things; a general search engine is not automatically the best place to find an academic paper, an archived newspaper, an old household manual, a historical document, or government data.

Sometimes the problem isn't that the information does not exist, but rather that you simply aren't looking in the correct spot or using the right tools.

6. Repeat the Process with New Keywords

Do not simply rely on one search term and search the exact same phrase over and over again. Think of all possible names, words, phrases, spellings, and concepts that may be similar to, identical with, or related to your chosen topic. 

Consider, however, that if you are researching something historical, terms may also be completely different than what you're used to; a “housewife” may have been called something else in another period. A cleaning product may have been sold under an old brand name. A kitchen appliance may have been described with entirely different terminology. If your subject has alternate names, historical spellings, regional terminology, old brand names, or period-specific language, hone in on those as well.

Switch things around. Mix them up. Try different combinations. In general, use anything relevant that you can think of; experiment with combinations of keywords; allow those searches to deepen the pool of available results until you've exhausted every relevant word combination you can think of.

Pay attention to your notes throughout the process, and to the information you find, because they will often provide you with entirely new keywords to search or new areas you had not previously considered; every useful piece of information can become another breadcrumb.

When you can no longer think of any relevant words, phrases, combinations, or directions to explore, congratulations! Your research has probably ended for the time being. Because, of course, good research is rarely truly finished; new information appears. New sources are digitized. Old assumptions are challenged. Someone finds a dusty little household ledger, diary, cookbook, or newspaper article in an archive and suddenly an entire subject looks rather different.

For now, though, you have reached the point where you can reasonably stop digging and begin putting the pieces together.

licated subject usually requires a willingness to look at more than one kind of information.

Make sure you cite your sources directly in your notes- including book titles, authors, page numbers, websites, publication dates, and any other information you may need to find that material again later. Never tell yourself that you will remember where a particular fact came from. You will not ... Or perhaps you will remember that you read it somewhere in a book, on a website, at some point (possibly last Tuesday). But that's not especially helpful when you need to find it again six months later.

7. Results and Compilation

Once you have gathered a fair amount of information, begin compiling it into coherent and easily digestible pieces. Compare what different sources say. Look for agreements and contradictions. Consider which sources are strongest, which claims are best supported, and where uncertainty still remains. Then record your findings somewhere useful for future reference.

Finally, draw your conclusions. Be willing to admit when the answer is “I do not actually know yet”, however. There is nothing shameful about that conclusion. In fact, it is considerably more respectable than pretending certainty because you found three websites that all copied the same unsourced paragraph from one another.

Proper research is not about finding evidence for what you already wanted to believe. It is about following the evidence as carefully as you can, even when it leads somewhere unexpected.

Sometimes you will begin with one answer and end with another. Sometimes you will discover that a beloved piece of homemaking wisdom is completely wrong, actually. Sometimes you will find that nobody actually knows the answer at all ... And occasionally, after several days of searching, you will discover that everyone has apparently been confidently repeating the same ahistorical nonsense that originated in a spam email as fact, since 2004.

Such is life.

The important thing is that you learned how to look. That skill will serve you far better than memorizing any single answer ever could.