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Part Two: Planning Research In Part One, we introduced you to how researchers think. In Part Two, we show how researchers plan research projects. The first step is to decide what you want to study. Chapter 4 deals with this important step. Part of the process of selecting a problem to investigate is learning about existing research on the problem. In research, this process is known as reviewing the literature. Chapter 4, therefore, includes details on how to plan and conduct a review of the literature. With the growing importance of the Internet and Web sites as sources of social research information, Chapter 4 also provides an introduction to Internet searching and provides some selected social research Web sites. After you know what you want to study, you can begin to plan how you are going to carry out your study. This is the second main step in research and consists of formulating a design or plan for the project. Four chapters are devoted to this process. Chapter 5 addresses the main decisions that have to be made in preparing a research design, including the definition of the concepts or variables you intend to study. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 describe ways of measuring concepts and variables. The important topic of selecting a sample, including different kinds of samples you might want to use, is discussed in Chapter 8. After you finish Part Two you should have a pretty good idea of how to select a question to investigate and how to prepare a research design to provide data for answering your research question. |