Disciplinary Approaches in AP Research Inquiry

Academic Context and Curriculum Framework

• AP Daily for AP Research provides fundamental instruction on research inquiry, methodology, and researcher typologies.
• Pedagogical frameworks developed at institutions such as Long Beach Poly High School by educators including Samantha Lawrence emphasize discipline-specific approaches during the initial phase of the research process.
• Understanding research design requires exploring both discipline-specific approaches (methods, questions, and frameworks inherent to a field) and researcher style/preference perspectives.

Identifying Disciplines and Subcategories

• Research inquiry begins by determining target academic disciplines or developing a list of potential fields of interest.
• Systematic selection of a discipline involves collecting scholarly research papers from academic databases such as EBSCO or other accessible database repositories.
• Scholarly literature should be examined to identify subcategories within broad disciplinary umbrellas to align research with specific topic interests.
• Disciplinary structure examples:
  • Social Sciences: Serves as a broad umbrella discipline.
  • Subcategories of Social Sciences: Include specific sub-fields such as Communication, History, and Political Science.
• Umbrella disciplines represent broad categories of knowledge, whereas subcategories provide narrower focus areas for specific research questions.

Structural Analysis of Scholarly Literature

• Reviewing sample papers within a chosen discipline reveals how researchers in that field frame inquiries and formulate answers.
• Focus of Research / Inquiry:
  • Located within the opening introduction section of a research paper.
  • Commonly situated immediately prior to the methods section, typically appearing at the end of the literature review.
  • Represents the primary concern that guides the entire research project.
• Method and Approach Section:
  • Outlines the specific strategy, tools, and procedures used to answer the guiding question.
• Conclusion Section:
  • Re-evaluates the core inquiry and summarizes how the collected evidence answers the research question.

Disciplinary Ways of Knowing and Research Models

• Disciplines utilize distinct methodologies and ways of knowing to address questions:
  • Business: Employs methodologies such as surveying consumers or analyzing existing marketplace and commercial data.
  • Social Sciences: Employs traditional experimental models or the critical analysis of primary texts.
• Primary Research Model:
  • Research where data is original, collected first-hand, and analyzed directly by the researchers themselves.
  • Present across all disciplines, including business, natural sciences, and social sciences.
• Secondary Research Model:
  • Research based on gathering pre-existing data and applying it toward new research questions or analyzing it to gain novel insights.
  • Highly valuable across all academic disciplines, providing an effective pathway when physical, financial, or practical constraints limit primary data collection.
• Explore-Explain Model:
  • A foundational inquiry model present across all disciplines where research begins by exploring an unexamined phenomenon and progresses toward explaining its underlying mechanisms.

Creative and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

• The Create Model:
  • A creative element exists across all academic disciplines without exception.
  • Researchers incorporating creative components must investigate what the "create" framework specifically looks like within their chosen discipline.
• Interdisciplinary Approaches:
  • Academic disciplines do not exist in isolation or in a vacuum; deep intersections exist across fields.
  • Tools, methodologies, and frameworks from one discipline can be combined with those from another discipline.
  • Combining interdisciplinary techniques expands ways of knowing and produces novel, multi-dimensional understandings of complex topics.

Key Considerations for Framing Research Inquiry

• Researchers selecting a disciplinary approach should systematically address the following evaluative questions:
  • What types of questions does the selected discipline characteristically ask?
  • What form do answers in that discipline take (e.g., quantitative and numeric vs. qualitative and descriptive)?
  • How is secondary research structured and executed within the specific discipline if primary research cannot be conducted?
  • What constitutes the "create" model within the discipline if a creative research output is intended?