What all this about research design?

Research design is used to address the research topic effectively as clear as possible. In social science studies, the main function of research design is to ensure the evidence obtained from a statistical test and to draw inference accurately about the research problem. In this blog, I will brief you about what is the research design and its purpose(Anastas & Congress, 1999).

Before proceeding, let us understand what the essential elements of research design are:

• It allows to identify the research problem unambiguously
• Literature review associated with the problem statement
• Framing the hypothesis clearly
• Description of data
• Techniques suitable for the Statistical Data Analysis and conclude whether the null hypothesis framed is true or not.

Research design is the art of selecting the relevant or suitable research techniques by a researcher for the study. A research design explains the types of research. Some of them are experimental, descriptive, sequential, explanatory, etc. In general, every research design involves the following three steps; data collection, analysis and data interpretation(Cuthill, 2002).

Research design will determine the type of research problem what an organisation is facing. Thus, the design stage helps the researcher to determine which tools are helpful and how to use them. An effective research design usually generates less bias in the data and improves the accuracy of the same. In that sense, the following are the four major characteristics of research design to be taken care of for a good research design:

Generalization – Every researcher used to design for the sample data collection and a proper research design should be suitable for general case with similar accuracy(Paul J. Lavrakas, 2008).

Validity – Selection of measuring tools is the important one and it should be related to the objective in getting valid results.

Neutrality – while setting up the study, we have to make certain assumptions about the data to collect, that assumptions should not reflect bias in the research design, and it should be neutral(Trochim, 2001).

Reliability – The research design should be a reliable one and it should deliver standard results.

The design of research is broadly classified into two major groups, Qualitative and Quantitative. Qualitative research identifies the relationship between the data and the mathematical observations whereas the Quantitative research make use of the statistical results to collect valid and actionable perceptions(Yin, 2003). The types of research are further classified into numerous forms. Let me give you an outline for some of them:

Descriptive research design –Descriptive research is about describing the situation under study. The process involves collecting, analysing and draw conclusions from the collected data. Descriptive research is easier to conduct and helps others to understand the research in better manner.

Experimental research design – Experimental research identifies the relationship between the effect and cause of a problem situation. It is the design where the impact of the dependent variable can be identified using independent relationship. This kind of research is common in social science and psychology to study the human behaviour of two groups.

Correlational research design – Correlation research is not like an experimental design, it helps to examine the association between the two variables under study. The relationship between the two variables can be identified using a correlation coefficient value. Usually the correlation values ranges between -1 and +1. -1 means negative association and +1 means the positive association between the two variables under study.

Explanatory research design – Explanatory research design explores the questions of type how, why and what research problems.

Case study design – Case study design is used to study a particular problem deeply than any other design. It is used to test the theory or model related to the real world applications.

Cross-sectional Design – A cross-sectional design is similar to the correlational design but here we can identify the relationship between two or more variables and also it measures the difference between the variables.

Exploratory research design – This type of research is conducted when there is no or few information about the problem available in literature. The aim of this research is to generate new ideas and develop new methodologies or theories to the audience.

Longitudinal research design – Longitudinal research design are conducted when the data is of follow up study. In other words, when the data is collected or recorded repeatedly with regular intervals then the longitudinal design can be used to study the phenomena. It describes the pattern of change and explore the reason for that change. It is important to note that each measurements in longitudinal study are related to the time period(Ployhart & Vandenberg, 2010).

In summary, every research design is selected by the researcher according to the research phenomena. The main thing is to keep in mind in selecting the research design is that it should minimise the error or bias and results in valid conclusion. Errors can be occured in several stages of research say for example, there may be few entries in the data is missing and few entries are wrongly recorded. These are the essential points to validate before processing the data analysis. Thus, selection of research design is always in the researcher’s hand and the study they opted(Lavrakas, 2008).