Summary
The episode works through four questions that students often find difficult in the lesson on research questions, theory and the literature. It traces the debate over whether exploratory researchers should keep away from the literature, from the early advice of Glaser and Strauss to Blumer's sensitizing concepts, and asks listeners to tell a sensitizing concept from a hypothesis in two invented questions about stigma. The hosts appraise an invented methods paragraph whose claims about kappa, emerging themes, counting and design are inconsistent with its constructivist paradigm, then disagree about pragmatism before agreeing that every methods section should say what it treats accounts as, what counts as a finding and what role the researcher played. A harder example calculates frequency and intensity effect sizes in an invented qualitative meta-summary and shows how papers from one parent study inflate a finding's frequency, alongside a 2014 comparison of search frames and the GRADE-CERQual distinction between frequency and confidence. A final example screens and rewrites an invented question about caregivers of people living with dementia, drawing on Statistics Canada loneliness data and the emergent-design provisions of TCPS 2.