Generalizability & Transferability

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Transferability is easy to understand when you consider that we are constantly applying this concept to aspects of our daily lives. If, for example, you are an inexperienced composition instructor and you read a study in which a veteran writing instructor discovered that extensive prewriting exercises helped students in her classes come up with much more narrowly defined paper topics, you could ask yourself how much the instructor's classroom resembled your own. If there were many similarities, you might try to draw conclusions about how increasing the amount of prewriting your students do would impact their ability to arrive at sufficiently narrow paper topics. In doing so, you would be attempting to transfer the composition researcher's techniques to your own classroom.

An example of transferable research in the field of English studies is Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman's (1988) study of a graduate student in a rhetoric Ph.D. program. In this case study, the researchers describe in detail a graduate student's entrance into the language community of his academic program, and particularly his struggle learning the writing conventions of this community. They make conclusions as to why certain things might have affected the graduate student, "Nate," in certain ways, but they are unable to generalize their findings to all graduate students in rhetoric Ph.D. programs. It is simply one study of one person in one program. However, from the level of detail the researchers provide, readers can take certain aspects of Nate's experience and apply them to other contexts and situations. This is transferability. First-year graduate students who read the Berkenhotter, Huckin, and Ackerman study may recognize similarities in their own situation while professors may recognize difficulties their students are having and understand these difficulties a bit better. The researchers do not claim that their results apply to other situations. Instead, they report their findings and make suggestions about possible causes for Nate's difficulties and eventual success. Readers then look at their own situation and decide if these causes may or may not be relevant.