The Importance of Choosing a Right Tool

Most aspiring scholars are fascinated by the pure, rigorous and neatly interwoven system of theoretical concepts, especially when clad with esoteric methodology. A acquaintance with sophisticated research methodology constitutes a significant part of job qualification. Also, to the non-Westerners, just like French wine or a Swiss-Army knife, the lofty prestige of their expertise considerably depends on imports from the more advanced part of the globe, especially from the United State in the case of communication study.

And the painful thing is that such hardship might be related to what we call 'cultural differences, ' meaning that it might be insurmountable in the near future.
Of course, the inaccessibility of data, be it primary or secondary, collection may not be a critical factor for serious researchers, as far as obviously there may turn to other subjects, such as audience surveys.However, such a frustrating experience, as I have already gone through, may discourage young scholars to avoid certain research topics subconsciously.The ensuing disparity in the choice of research topics and strategies may bring about potentially serious holes and weak points in the development of the research field as a whole.
Nevertheless, there are always modest solutions and alternatives, which are not necessarily written in detail in the textbooks.For instance, I experimented with 'oral history/life narrative' method which is less ambitious than participant observation but offers some opportunities to understand the organizational culture [4].Together with my students, I made a series of extended interviews and finished successfully couple of papers on the occupational culture in a marginal genre of popular culture.I am currently investigating the possibility of 'case study' methods for inaccessible research topics.They represent some attempts to find 'detours' to get at the inside knowledge, instead of more straight-forward research methods as mentioned above.Thereby, I wish to find some general patterns and insights from limited cases.
Not surprisingly, the decades-old field of communication study is now equipped with sufficient inventory of sophisticated methodology.The entire wisdom of the past breed of researchers is well summarized either in textbooks or journal articles and apparently ready for use for the next generation.Nevertheless, especially those in the non-Western countries need to be careful in mobilizing the tools.While seemingly written in general terms, just like concepts and theories, each methodology was arguably crafted piece by piece through scores of laborious painful works among hordes of empirical researcher, be it qualitative or quantitative.The specific features and know-how's of each empirical dirty work are abstracted (or tossed away) during the process of conceptualization.While young scholars now enjoy the

Yung-Ho Im*
Professor, Deparment of Communication, Pusan National University, Busan 609-735, South Korea benefit of skipping the dirty work and learning from books short-cut knowledge in the form of dictums and statements, they are likely to forget how and in what context they were formulated.In the sense that research methods are concerned with dealing with people and human relations, the secrets and wisdom of their field work are culturally imbedded.I think that is why I had encountered enormous, unexpected troubles in the application of the seemingly harmless tools to the practical situation.
After a couple of decades in this field as a researcher, I have my own stories on trials-and-errors which I think are invaluable asset for devising future research.That experience is not always written in the textbook.In particular, researchers in the non-Western countries should not expect manual-like prescription from research method books, but instead keep groping for ways to adapt, revise, and invent them for the practical use in their indigenous context.Research methods are not just neutral tools, but something to be naturalized into the local ecology of knowledge production.