Designing a Study You Can Defend
Design a credible research study by choosing appropriate methods, sampling strategies, measures, and procedures that fit your research question and produce evidence capable of supporting defensible conclusions.
Your question should determine how you study it.
An interesting research question becomes meaningful evidence only when the study is designed to answer it appropriately. Choices about approach, participants, measurements, procedures, and comparisons determine what researchers will be able to observe and what conclusions the resulting evidence can reasonably support.
Research design therefore involves a series of connected methodological decisions. Researchers must consider quantitative, qualitative, or mixed approaches, select suitable study designs and sampling strategies, determine appropriate sample sizes, and address validity, reliability, bias, feasibility, and other threats to credible findings.
More sophisticated methods do not automatically produce stronger research. A defensible design is one in which each methodological choice has a clear reason, important limitations have been anticipated, and the evidence being collected is genuinely capable of addressing the question the study set out to investigate.
From research question to study design
Work through the methodological decisions that determine how your research will produce credible evidence.
A defensible design also has ethical responsibilities.
Before data collection begins, researchers need to consider participants, consent, privacy, integrity, and the ethical obligations attached to the study.
Doing Research Without Compromising Ethics
Understand research ethics and integrity, protect participants and research data, address informed consent and conflicts of interest, and meet the ethical responsibilities that apply from study planning through publication.
Continue to Part 05 →