I must start by admitting that in my quest for success, I have pursued money-making avenues that I had never envisaged when studying for my Journalism degree. One such avenue is academic writing, which has over the last three years, seen me research and write comprehensive and A-rated papers for students both at home and abroad. Recently however, I was applying for a writing position for one online academic writing company. As most such online writing services do when evaluating new writers, I was asked to write on a rather interesting subject. It read thus, ‘is the statement by (Griffith 97) that “there is no hope of doing perfect research” true?’ Well, below is my take on the subject.

The statement by (Griffith 97) that there is no hope of doing perfect research” is arguably true. In the statement, Griffith categorically states that perfect research is impossible to conduct.  But is it? Well, in the real word, perfection is often thought as an impossible mileage to achieve; specifically, every task that humans undertake contain some degree of error and research is no different. In order to determine whether there is hope of anyone ever conducting perfect research, one needs to know what the term ‘perfect research’ means.

 The Merriam Webster dictionary defines the term perfect as “being entirely without fault or defect: flawless; satisfying all requirements; or corresponding to an ideal standard or abstract concept”. Theoretically, perfection is unattainable since it is practically impossible for anyone to attain excellence or soundness in every quality, element or part of an activity.  The Merriam-Webster defines research as the “careful or diligent search; or the studious inquiry or examination; especially; investigation or experimentation aimed at the discovery and interpretation of facts, revision of accepted theories or laws in the light of new facts or practical application of such new or revised theories or laws”.

Looking at the two definitions above, it is rather obvious that there is indeed no hope of conducting perfect research.  Assuming that one can attain perfection, the definition of research in itself suggests that there are several stages in the research that would expose the exercise to imperfections. First, if indeed research is an investigation or experimentation, there is bound to be shortfalls in the way a person conducts the experiments or investigations. In scientific research where research is conducted in a laboratory setting for example, the samples under experimentation could be contaminated hence meaning that the end results would not be perfect. One can however argue that the person doing the research can minimise exposure of the lab sample to contaminants. While this is true to some extent, human beings are themselves imperfect in every sense of the word, and are therefore unable to ensure absolute non-exposure of samples to contaminants contained in air, or surfaces, and which are not apparent to the human eyes.

Overall, no research however well conducted is perfect. Issues concerning the validity of the results, the representation sample used, the interpretation of results, and research biases are always standing in the way of conducting what would otherwise qualify as ‘perfect’ research. Hence my answer to Griffith’s question would be- there is no hope, unless of course, new discoveries are made that would make perfection a reality.