Aids

Internet resources

Here are just a few of the many sites that provide information and guidance on the design of research. You may want to examine some of these to get additional ideas on ways to design your research project.

Research Methods, provides brief descriptions of and links to online books, manuals, and guides about research methods

Research Methods and Statistics, Centre for Psychology Resources: Athabasca University, presents links to a wide variety of sites dealing with research designs and methods, including library research, qualitative and quantitative methods and research tutorials

Time in Research, distinguishes between cross-sectional and longitudinal studies; notes two ways of collecting longitudinal data — through repeated measurement and as part of time series collection

Types of Designs, defines and discusses three types of designs — randomized experiments, quasi-experiments, and non-experiments

Types of Questions, presents research questions as one of three kinds: descriptive in purpose, which is to describe a variable as it currently exist); relational, to measure the relationship between two variables; or causal (to determine whether one variable, a new focus for a family planning program, for example, resulted in changes in use of contraceptives)

Key terms

Main points

1. A design is the plan you develop for conducting an investigation and for analyzing the resulting data.
2. Designs have to be appropriate for the purpose of the research. Social research is conducted to: (1) explore a topic or problem; (2) to describe one or more variables as accurately as possible; and (3) to explain why certain patterns or relationships occur as they do.
3. Social research may be quantitative, where observations are represented by numbers; or qualitative, where observations and relations are described in words. Each approach is useful for different research purposes.
4. Quantitative designs tend to be fixed and once set are not easily changed, while qualitative designs allow a   flexible approach to data collection.
5. In designing research, investigators have to be clear about the unit or basis for analyzing the data. Units of analysis may be individuals, groups, geographical areas, or other entities. The unit of analysis sometimes differs from the unit from whom data are obtained.
6. Research is a creative process. While many designs have common features, each is created to answer a specific research question.
7. There are many research designs. Some of the more frequently used ones are: cross-sectional designs for surveys, designs for observing trends in a variable over time, longitudinal designs for observing changes in variables as they occur, designs for using available data, experimental designs, qualitative designs based on unstructured or informal observation and interviewing, and designs based on the case study approach or use of focus groups.
8. Many studies use a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches.