Analysing Memoir Topic Trends in the Social and Political Sciences in the Faculty of Arts, Media and Social Sciences at NUR

Abstract

This research analyzes the frequency of undergraduate research topics selected as “memoirs” by 4th-year students in the social and political science departments in the Faculty of Arts, Media and Social Sciences (FAMSS) at the National University of Rwanda. Its objective was to ascertain (a) if multiple instances of near-identical topics form identifiable trends, and (b) what convincing explanations might be identified as causal to these topic trends.

In total, 1335 memoirs submitted between 1997 and 2011 were analyzed. In this study it was hypothesized that certain research topics are preferred by NUR students in different years, depending on the national popularity of specific social, political and developmental issues, and that these preferences change over time.

The researcher used unix-based grep for string analysis of memoir topics, which were then aggregated into frequency histograms and converted the data to N-maps for visualization of the change over time in the respective topics. The research findings indicate that memoir topics follow trends in “popularity” for social research: they rise, remain steady, or fall, depending on exogenous social stimuli, and perhaps for endogenous reasons too.

The research concluded that changing preferences for research topics by students can be linked to national or regional events. The causal mechanism evolves from popular discussion in the media, leading to student interest, and eventually to student-selected research topics. The most obvious examples were government policies and programs which attracted significant student attention, causing increased topic frequency, followed by decline as the issue decreased in popularity.

The research also identified the tendency for students to copy their research topic from memoirs existing in the Faculty Library. While the issue of plagiarism was not specifically addressed by this study, it is possible that the N-map trends portrayed by this research emerge in part because some students have used past memoirs as templates, possibly including indirect or direct copying. For this reason, the research concluded that while the majority of topic trending observed in the N-grams may be explainable the popularity of national issues, copy-cat research and outright plagiarism could also play a role in these trending phenomena. Further research using full-text soft copies (not available for pre-2009 topics) is suggested.

Recommendations include that students should be guided towards unexplored areas of new research and actively discouraged from replicating the research of previous year's memoirs; that the memoir room within the Faculty Library serves little purpose other than to encourage copying and plagiarism and should therefore be closed until a plan for its usefulness can be envisioned; that the teaching of Research Methodology in the social and political sciences is inadequately preparing students for the challenges of actual research (which pushes them to consider plagiarism as a pathway to success) and that NUR should systematize and upgrade its present rudimentary plagiarism detection measures and to publicize this to all students so as to discourage topic replication, copying and outright plagiarism.

Keywords: N-gram, plagiarism, research methods, National University of Rwanda, memoir topics