Room for reflection

Ying-Tzu Lin

What is ‘ the room for reflection‘ in research?

Where to find the room for reflection?

How does this room look like?

As much as flow charts on research methodology, design thinking and survival guides for research writing demonstrate various way of DOING research, the blank space for digest, to reflect in between every stage has rarely being mentioned. At least, no one ever mention it exists to me in my whole academic training.

I come into the realization that reflection takes space in a hard way.

I strolled in street markets for months, documented everything and nothing, feeling lost. Nothing seemed to make sense for ‘the research question‘ I was supposed to answer. I can blame no one because I wrote down that question myself. I collected pieces of everything as told in methodology textbook: still and moving images of public spaces, conversations, gossips and still wondering if I miss something because I don’t understand Dutch well enough. I stared at these pieces of puzzles I gathered, wondering if I still misses the most important things, or they simply don’t come together and I am just fooling around. It’s like when you stared a puzzle for too long, you lost perspectives.

Memories of ‘I thought I was supposed to write but nothing came out of my brain and my finger’ cluttered like a cloud. Then there were countless moments of anxiety. And somehow silver linings always appeared in unexpected moments: during a walk, morning shower, reading something unrelated to my research, while talking to someone and late in the night waiting for sleeps to come. As if only when you take distance from the quest, movement of pieces would activate.

The ‘DOING‘ of research sort of implies actions needs to happen. It’s a product line that one thing goes after the other. The room for reflection signifies the waiting is also parts of ‘DOING‘. Like fermentation process. It takes time for microbes to activate and doing their work. And you need to air the jar from time to time to prevent explosion. The action of airing is creating room for reflection in research. The waiting and airing are seemingly passive yet necessary to have the process complete. One may argue that fermentation in contemporary food industry can be speed up with assist of certain chemistry trick. By now, we should all know that the health risk that came along. So does doing research.