Advancing Research as Praxis in Public Administration Graduate Education

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.