A New Word for Research

Photo by Christian Kielberg on Unsplash

The other day, I went on a research trip for my new book. It was a sunny day, and I walked around a London neighbourhood, looking at houses. Then, I sat on a park bench and eavesdropped on conversations. I sat down at a café for lunch. I watched the people and listened in on their (rather loud) conversations, then watched the owner come in on his bike. I watched him as he put some music on, checked the kitchen had everything they needed, poured water on the pavement just outside the café to wash the previous night’s mess.

Then we sat down together, and I listened as he talked about rising costs and how the government took away the subsidies that have been in place since COVID, and now shops that have been around for decades are closing down. He talked about how he’s trying to keep his head above water, how people are coming together for a small food co-op and mutual aid at his shop, how they offer free coffee and a warm place for the street cleaners and security guards of the stalls outside. How someone just last month told his Iranian wife to go back where she came from, on the doorstep of the small business they’ve been holding together with duct tape and meticulous attention.

When I came home that night and told my partner about it, he cautioned me to fact-check. This comment annoyed me, and I snapped at him. Later, in my morning pages, I tried to figure out why I was annoyed and, more than that, when I’d stopped thinking like him. Because a decade ago, I would be that person who says fact-check the numbers. Back then, when I said I was going to do research, I resoundingly did not mean walking around and sitting on a bench and eavesdropping on conversations. Or even talking to one person about his life.

In academia, research has a specific methodology. When I was an academic, when I said research, I meant collecting data and evidence to support or refute a hypothesis. I meant going into preschools and asking: Can preschoolers coordinate two dimensions of an object at the same time before or after they demonstrate coordinating these two dimensions sequentially? I would collect data (children’s responses to a game I designed or adapted to test this question), and then run statistical analyses. Sometimes you do qualitative research, mostly interviewing people to see what themes come up. On the surface, qualitative research is closer to the “writing research” I’d been doing. But the qualitative research I did was always a preliminary step towards quantitative work. It was a way to formulate the question I wanted to ask.

What I do now is different. Academic research starts with a question; research is the tool you use to answer it. But building a world for a novel, even if it’s a realist novel, requires a different way of knowing. The eavesdropped conversations and the way the houses look aren’t evidence. They’re texture.

At some point, research turned from running tests and statistical analyses to walking around, looking, and listening. I still feel uncomfortable saying “I’ve done research on floods” when what I mean is “I’ve read a couple of reports on floods in the UK and watched a documentary”. At first, I thought this was just the voice in the back of my head saying that art isn’t a real job. But the real issue is that we’re using the same word for two different things. When writers said they’re doing research, I used to picture interviews, logs, transcripts, themes—a version of qualitative research at the very least. But this is something else. It's more like absorbing than cataloguing, more embodied than analytical. We need a new word for it.