Are you confused about what comes first, a research design or a problem statement? A research problem leads a researcher to create a research design. Research design can be defined as the overall strategy used to conduct research. It’s a concise and logical plan that a researcher designs. Research design includes all steps from selecting a research problem to successfully conducting the research.
Advantages of a research design:
- Whenever a PhD or MS student starts research, he knows nothing about what to do and how to conduct the research. Even he has to search what will be the problem statement of his research. That’s why there must be a strong and right direction for the researcher that can lead him to his destination. Research design is the way that leads a researcher how to conduct the whole research. It also tells the researcher about the basic steps used in the research process.
- Preparation of research design not only streamlines the research strategy but also saves the research time. After creating a good research design, the researcher gets familiar with all the steps he needs to solve the problem statement. As a result, after creating a research design, he can take easily and fastly steps to conduct research successfully.
- Based on research design, a researcher can easily shape the objectives of the research.
- A good research design helps the researcher to complete the research with minimum resources and workforce.
- Moreover, a research design helps the researcher to find the weak points of research. In this way, he can easily change research design to conduct authentic research.
Points we need to consider while creating research design:
Preparation of research design is a rigorous task, but still, to conduct the research successfully, we have to create a research design. Let’s read how we can create a research design with 7 easy steps.
Before diving, let’s have an overview of what comes under a research design. Successful preparation of research design includes the following decisions.
- What will be the aims of the research
- Define research approach
- What research design will a researcher use in research
- Identifying sampling methods
- Data collection methods used to research.
- Decide data collection procedures
- Select strategies to analyze data.
Getting PhD dissertation help is very beneficial for implementing the above points when working on the research design.
1. Specify the aims of the research
In the first step of research design, a researcher defines his research aims by focusing on the research statement. A research statement is the only thing that can help the researcher to define your research aims.
In the research aims, you can include why you want to conduct the research and what leads you to conduct research. Moreover, in research aims, you can also write research contributions. Specifying is the first step in the preparation of research design.
2. Choose a research approach
To define the research approach, first, analyze whether you need a quantitative or qualitative approach for research. Quantitative research focuses on numbers, while qualitative research is concerned with conceptual meaning. In qualitative research, we take in-depth knowledge about a specific culture, place or product and generate new ideas. It’s more flexible, and you will consider the results you found after conducting the whole research. On the other hand, in quantitative research, we start from a hypothesis and check by experiments whether the hypothesis is correct or not. In short, in the quantitative approach, we define the effectiveness of a product, hypothesis or treatment.
The selection of the research approach depends upon the research problem. You can take help from your professors on how to select a relevant approach. Moreover, there are researches that need a mixed approach. So it depends upon the research problem which research approach gets us the desired results.
3. Select relevant research design:
After selecting the approach for research next step is to select the research design. Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches have different research designs.
Types of quantitative research designs are:
- Correlational research design
- Quasi-experimental research design
- Experimental research design
- Descriptive research design
Use any of the above research designs depending upon the problem statement to conduct successful research.
Qualitative research has the following research designs:
- Ethnography
- Case study
- Phenomenology
- Grounded theory
When you study these research designs, you will find that quantitative designs are more defined than qualitative.
4. Select research sampling method and research focus:
You should know before conducting research what the focus of your research is. In short, you should know the population of your research. After defining the population, you need to select the sampling methods. There are two sampling methods,
- Probability sampling
- Non-probability sampling
Sampling methods help the researcher to generalize his research results to his focus population.
5. Choose data collection methods:
Researchers use data collection methods to collect relevant data for their research work. It depends upon research what kind of data it needs. Sometimes researchers also use more than one method for data collection.
Different data collection methods are:
- Conducting surveys
- Designing questionnaires
- Interviews
- Website scraping
6. Defining data collection procedures:
After defining which data collection method you will use, you need to plan how you will implement that method. For example, if you want to conduct a survey, you need to define the questions you will use for conducting the survey.
7. Select strategies to analyze your data:
After successfully selecting what type of data you need and by which method you can get it. The next step is to analyze your data. Data collection and data analysis are the backbones of every research. Data analysis and collection define whether your research will generate satisfactory results or not.
There are two methods to analyze data.
- Inductive
- Deductive
The selection of the data analysis techniques will be based on the type of data.
Summary:
After selecting a problem statement, a researcher does not know how he will conduct his research. Preparation of research design gives a roadmap to the researcher on how to conduct research. While creating a research design, a researcher defines his research aims, research approach and data collection methods. Moreover, he selects research designs, data collection procedures and data analysis strategies. Preparation of research designs help the research to save resources, complete research in time and maintain a good relationship with the research.
