Understanding and Applying Research Design

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OBSERVATION AND EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATION

In dealing with the building blocks of the Wheel of Science, we start with theories and hypotheses to allow us to frame research. Once theory has given us direction for research, we create hypotheses to test our theoretical propositions. When we know what concepts we’re testing and how we expect them to work together, we need to consider what research design will best test our hypotheses. Research designs give social scientists tools that help determine what observations they are going to use to test their hypotheses.

Social researchers draw on four basic research designs from which to collect data to observe the concepts they want to test: surveys, experiments, field research, and secondary sources (which include historical documents, aggregate [or comparative] data, and content analysis). We devote individual chapters to discussing five designs: surveys, experiments, field research, and two of the secondary source designs: aggregate (or comparative) and content analysis. Each research design offers researchers unique ways to collect data about people and social things. It is also quite common for researchers to combine methods in order to triangulate their data.

Designs fall into two basic types, quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative designs rely primarily on describing or measuring phenomena in quantity—generally thought of as numerical quantity. Quantitative designs employ statistics to describe large populations with survey data ...