Democratization won’t save research

It is a band-aid for a deeper problem

Democratizing research is still a debated topic at the moment. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer about whether or not it should be done, and from what I can tell, that’s because people are having different arguments on top of each other. Simplifying the argument into the Yays and the Nays, the discussion is oddly skewed. People against democratization say it’s too much time and effort that doesn’t produce much value, but a good amount of harm. Interestingly, even those in favor admit the possible dangers but say that the value to the practice and the organization outweighs them. The stakes of this argument have gotten higher given recent global industry and technological shifts, so I wanted to disentangle the different arguments to get a bit of clarity.

Generally, the disagreements about democratization seem to come from two sources:

• How people explicitly or implicitly define the term “democratization”
• What problem democratization is being used to solve

Let’s break them down.

Photo by Ernie Journeys on Unsplash

What the heck is research democratization?

If you are a researcher at an organization or you work with or around some of them, you’re probably familiar with the concept of democratization. In a nutshell, it involves a researcher or research team teaching non-researchers (designers, product managers, engineers, etc.) to do some researchy things. These partners will get anything from guides and templates to more direct guidance including crash courses and workshops so that they can do things that a researcher would normally be responsible for, with varying degrees of competency.

The differences in how people define “democratization” boils down to a few things:

• What types of research are democratized? (Formative? Generative? Evaluative?)
• What phase of the research process are non-researchers involved in? (Planning? Building? Data collection? Analysis and synthesis? Reporting?)
• How much of the research process is done ONLY by non-researchers, without a researcher involved? (Different setups can range from a close partnership to the non-researchers…