Research: A Philosophical Position

Our standpoint on research is rather more difficult to articulate in terms of our position when we first set out on the research journey with APU design & technology. For in truth we had – at that time – very limited experience of anything that might be described as research methodology, and yet we had won the contract in direct competition with many experienced research groups. Our approach was to see the APU research task as a design task, with all the concomitant ‘needs-to-know’ that flow from the positions we have articulated in the preceding chapters. And we designed our way through it. In this chapter we relive some of the debates that enabled us to shape our position on research, using these to orientate ourselves with the research literature and with the pre-existing research traditions of the Assessment of Performance Unit. We emerge with a position that could barely be described as a paradigm, but that was – at the time – sufficiently clear to enable us to undertake the task and draw it to a successful conclusion.

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