How many hours will I have to spend collecting my data?
How many respondents will I have to interview to have a sufficient number of interviews?
How long will it take to locate the respondents?
How much travel time will be involved?
How long will each interview last?  
Also, how much will data collection cost?
Will there be costs for transportation to get to respondents?
Will there be other costs, such as having to pay for meals while collecting data?
Can I pay for these costs?
How long will it take to organize and analyze my data?
Can I complete the entire project in the time I have?

If you decide that the project will take too long or cost too much, you will have to reduce its scope or find a question you can investigate within your time and financial resources.

In addition, you should also ask yourself how excited you are about doing the project. Why am I interested in this question? How excited am I about it? Research is hard work. Even a small scale project can take many hours, weeks, and possibly months to complete. Being excited about your project and wanting to find answers to the problem you have selected can provide tremendous motivation to see the project to a successful conclusion. Your excitement, however, should not lead you to favor one set of results over others. Remember the norm of being disinterested in results. As a person, you can be interested in a certain problem and want to do research on it, but, as a researcher, you will want to do the research as honestly as you can and be ready to accept whatever results occur.

As you think about what you want to study, you will probably reject some ideas and begin to focus on a topic or question that interests you more than others. At this point, you will want to learn all you can about your area of interest. Researchers do this by conducting a review of the literature.

Reviewing the literature

Three planning activities will produce better results and save you a lot of time in conducting your literature review. These are:

• Defining the scope of the literature review;
• Identifying relevant information sources; and
• Preparing to record information you will find.

Finding information for a research paper is a research undertaking in itself. Several Web sites show ways to get started. Take a look at Research Helper or Steps in Research and Writing Process, Our site and the two just mentioned describe the typical steps involved. How you use these steps will depend on your topic and the kinds of information sources available to you. Be resourceful: adapt the steps described to your needs.

Defining the scope of the review

This step is necessary because a given concept or variable may be expressed in different ways in various reports you will read. A common variable, such as gender, for example, may be referred to as gender, as the sex of the person, or in terms of male-female or masculine-feminine relations. If you were doing research on gender roles, you would need to look for publications that contain any of these words in their titles. To do this, you would need to make a list of all possible words, terms or phrases that might be used to refer to gender and the roles of males and females. Your list of terms will define the scope of the relevant literature.

Frequently new variables are discovered during the review process. These variables and all the related terms you can think of should be added to the list of terms used in defining the scope of publications you will want to review. At some point, you have to decide how far you want to go in looking for similar or related terms. A practical guide is stop looking when you no longer find any new terms.