It’s NOT rocket science: rethinking our metaphors for research in health professions education

Context  The health professional education community is struggling with a number of issues regarding the place and value of research in the field, including: the role of theory‐building versus applied research; the relative value of generalisable versus contextually rich, localised solutions, and the relative value of local versus multi‐institutional research. In part, these debates are limited by the fact that the health professional education community has become deeply entrenched in the notion of the physical sciences as presenting a model for ‘ideal’ research. The resulting emphasis on an ‘imperative of proof’ in our dominant research approaches has translated poorly to the domain of education, with a resulting denigration of the domain as ‘soft’ and ‘unscientific’ and a devaluing of knowledge acquired to date. Similarly, our adoption of the physical sciences’‘imperative of generalisable simplicity’ has created difficulties for our ability to represent well the complexity of the social interactions that shape education and learning at a local level.