Abstract
Many aspects of doctoral supervision are well known in education from methods and methodology to research questions, philosophies and epistemologies. One core aspect that is touched upon less frequently yet is central to the lived experience of the researcher and that is essential for rigour and trust occupying a significant amount of cognitive effort is confidence and doubt. The use of confidence and doubt to drive research is a daily experience for the researcher yet the practice and challenges are infrequently addressed directly in doctoral environments. Confidence can be essential as a driver when researchers with strong convictions lack complete arguments to justify actions based on experiential, innate or purely intuitive motivations. Doubt can act as a valuable aid to personal critique and can mitigate the excesses of over-confidence. Overconfidence can blind a researcher to critical flaws whereas excessive doubt can destroy promising findings and innovations before they are proven. We reflect on supervisory experiences across masters and doctoral students and how the seductive search for certainty transforms into a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of design research contributing to what counts for new knowledge in design. We explore how the initial worries and concerns from novice researchers about reliability and rigour transform into an exchange between confidence and doubt which become central generators balancing critique, risk, experimentation and honesty. The dance between confidence and doubt therefore is critical to design research success.
Keywords
Doctoral Supervision; Confidence and Doubt; Design Research; Certainty
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.203
Citation
Hall, A.,and Hohl, M.(2023) Confidence and doubt in doctoral research: The temptation of certainty, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.203
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
fullpapers
Included in
Confidence and doubt in doctoral research: The temptation of certainty
Many aspects of doctoral supervision are well known in education from methods and methodology to research questions, philosophies and epistemologies. One core aspect that is touched upon less frequently yet is central to the lived experience of the researcher and that is essential for rigour and trust occupying a significant amount of cognitive effort is confidence and doubt. The use of confidence and doubt to drive research is a daily experience for the researcher yet the practice and challenges are infrequently addressed directly in doctoral environments. Confidence can be essential as a driver when researchers with strong convictions lack complete arguments to justify actions based on experiential, innate or purely intuitive motivations. Doubt can act as a valuable aid to personal critique and can mitigate the excesses of over-confidence. Overconfidence can blind a researcher to critical flaws whereas excessive doubt can destroy promising findings and innovations before they are proven. We reflect on supervisory experiences across masters and doctoral students and how the seductive search for certainty transforms into a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of design research contributing to what counts for new knowledge in design. We explore how the initial worries and concerns from novice researchers about reliability and rigour transform into an exchange between confidence and doubt which become central generators balancing critique, risk, experimentation and honesty. The dance between confidence and doubt therefore is critical to design research success.