Islands and archipelagos: Reconciling programmatic vs. opportunistic research in health professions education
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Perspect Med Educ (2020) 9:367–369 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-020-00628-7
Islands and archipelagos: Reconciling programmatic vs. opportunistic research in health professions education Glenn Regehr
Received: 14 October 2020 / Revised: 21 October 2020 / Accepted: 26 October 2020 / Published online: 19 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
In the Insider’s Perspective section, an insider in health professions education offers his/her thoughts, contemplations and advice on readers’ dilemmas or questions. You can send your questions or dilemmas to [email protected]. And who knows, your question may be the topic of the next Insider’s Perspective instalment. Dear insider, I have just finished my PhD and I want to continue in the field of HPE research. Now my professor tells me to develop a clear and recognizable program of research. I need to have a clear career topic, she says. Should I work on a program of research or can I be more opportunistic in my selection of questions to explore? There are several ways to think about what it means to engage in a program of research. How you choose to frame the notion of “programmatic” will affect how you think about the place of opportunistic research in your career. There are indeed some researchers in health professions education who pick a specific topic area and spend the majority of their research time in that area. Some of these individuals focus on a more conceptual issue, such as the nature of expertise in clinical diagnosis and management. Others focus on more concrete problems, such as the development and refinement of a particular educational innovation or assessment tool. Still others find a space that is somewhere in between, such as exploring the nature of entrustment decisions and how to record them (which encompasses both conceptual G. Regehr () Centre for Health Education Scholarship, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada [email protected]
and practical questions). Yet even these highly focused individuals are likely to stray into other areas of research occasionally, for any number of reasons. Their side forays may be because their job description includes a certain amount of support for others who are hoping to conduct research, even if it is not directly in the researcher’s core topic area. Or it may result from chance opportunities a researcher feels cannot be passed up (one colleague of mine describes occasionally joining research projects because she is excited to work with members of the research team regardless of the particular topic). Because of their deep commitment to some core research area, these focused researchers may draw the distinction between “their” programmatic research (which they actively pursue) and the “other” research activities they engage in opportunistically. Thus, they may try to actively limit the amount of opportunistic research they engage in and keep as much focus as possible on their own research program (an approach that your supervisor seems to be recommending). My own approach to rese
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