A Role-play Approach for Teaching Research Methodology

Assignments of Construction Management (CM) graduate programmes often require students to carry out research on real-world problems. To prepare students for this task, many CM-programmes contain a research methodology course. However, after taking part in these courses, many students still lack the ability to define the scope of their research problem and to find an appropriate research design. To counteract this situation, a role-play approach to teach research methodology was designed in which the students take on the role of "clients" and “researchers”. The role-play was embedded in two research methodology courses at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) and at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (South Africa). In both cases the lecturers noticed that this exercise proved to be an effective instrument. Students became more aware of the complexity of construction management problems and were better able to define their research problem and design. Furthermore, it helped to put research methodology into a more realistic and pragmatic perspective.