What should technical communicators investigate/research?

Our quarterly "What's the evidence?" column in TechCommWire attempts to look for evidence (not just opinions) to help technical communicators manage the daily conundrums we face in our profession. We want to locate and describe the evidence basis for so many of the received assumptions of best practice in tech comm.

It's a constant challenge to find evidence on matters of interest to practicing TCs – a point confirmed in a recent STC article Reflections on Research: Examining Practitioner Perspectives on the State of Research in Technical Communication (Kirk St.Amant, Louisiana Tech University and Lisa Meloncon, University of Cincinnati).

We want to explore the idea of crowd-funding research into burning questions. Is the tech community interested in contributing financially to studies into practical aspects of tech comm best practice?

Question Title

* 1. Do you think that our profession should conduct research into tech comm best practice?

Question Title

* 2. What do you think those studies should be looking at? What are your burning questions?

Question Title

* 3. If a piece of research were of interest to you or your organisation, would you consider contributing money to make it happen? Assume that the research aims and method (including details of quality assurance, sample-size, qualifications of researchers, planned detail-level of results, etc) are well-defined and publicly available.

Question Title

* 4. Are you interested in being part of this conversation?

Question Title

* 5. If you'd like to go on our mailing list for further correspondence on this subject, please enter your name and email address below.

T