Advancing Research as Praxis in Public Administration Graduate Education
Noe John Joseph E. Sacramento
University of the Philippines Cebu, Cebu City, The Philippines
Abstract
Engaging praxis (theory and practice) towards doing research is fundamental to every public administration (PA) scholar. However, public administration’s practical objective as praxis and applied social science is often challenged by an emergent culture of treating research as mere academic compliance for graduate PA students. Both descriptive and analytical, this study aims to investigate the topic selection and theme consideration in doing public administration research. This case study seeks to analyze the research outputs in the public administration masters program from 2005 to 2018 of a university in Cebu City, Philippines. The study summarized and adopted the trends of topic selection and theme consideration in conducting public administration research from Bowman and Sami (1978), Perry and Kraemer (1986), Box (1992), Bingham and William (1994), and Terry (2005) in Raadschelders & Lee (2011), for content analysis. The study utilized descriptive statistics to present the data. Findings show that most of the graduate students’ research outputs point towards a specific theme that is commonly used. Most of the graduate school studies are classified as informative research that is directed towards description and information over a particular topic or issue in focus. Also, there are themes and issues in PA research that are less considered because researchers may prefer an already established methodology and design. The discussion expounds on salient issues of academic research in PA and the importance of praxis and research utilization since these are necessary to strengthen the research culture in the discipline. This study will also recommend possible research themes and topics for PA graduate students to explore and to strengthen praxis in doing PA research.
Keywords: public administration, research, praxis, trends, topics, themes
Link to the Article