How to Choose the Right Research Design for Your Study

Choosing the right research design is essential to the success of any academic study. Just as there are many different academic disciplines, there are different research designs. Choosing the right research design, also known as research methodology, can be challenging. Let’s take a look at what research design is, why we need it, the factors involved in choosing a research design, and a few of the different types of research designs you can choose from.

Research Design: The Basics

What is research design? Research design is basically your strategy for answering your research question. In other words, it will determine how you find out the information you want to know. Once you have chosen your research topic and your research objectives, you will need to select a research methodology or approach to figure out how to achieve those objectives. Your research design should explain:

● What kind of data you collect (Primary data/Secondary data)
● Who you collect data from (Your sample)
● How you collect the data (Survey/Interviews)
● Your data collection procedures (Online/In-person?)
● How you analyze the data (Statistical analysis/Interpretation)

There are three broad categories of research methodology: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Qualitative research is more focused on understanding beliefs, concepts, and thoughts and tends to rely on interviews, literary reviews, and explorations of theory. Qualitative data focuses on understanding numbers and relies on graphs, statistics, and numbers. Mixed methods research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. So how do you decide which research design to use?

Choosing a Research Design

Several factors will determine the best research design for your project. The first is the nature of your research. What is it that you want to find out? Are you looking for statistics and numbers? Or do you need in-depth information about people’s first-hand experiences? Maybe your study would best be supported with some of both. To select the best research methodology, you should first look at what kind of information you need and how you will analyze it in order to answer your research question. 
You can refer to the table below for a quick reference.

The second factor to consider is the norms of your academic discipline. If you’re in a field like medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, or economics, it’s likely that a quantitative research design will best answer your research question. Humanities and social sciences like psychology, sociology, literature, or education are more inclined towards qualitative approaches. But all of these disciplines can incorporate a mixed methods approach.

Finally, you should consider what resources are available to you. Planning an ambitious, multi-stage study is useless if you don’t 

have the time, money, and personpower necessary to carry it out. So when choosing your research design, make sure that it can be executed within your allotted time frame and with the resources that you have.

Research Design: A More Detailed Look

Choosing a research design isn’t finished once you’ve figured out that broader type of research methodology that will best fit your study. There is no single “quantitative” or “qualitative” methodology that can answer every research question. Instead, within quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method approaches, there are a variety of specific research designs. These research designs differ by the type of data required, the type of analysis performed, and the question that is being answered. Now that we’ve looked at the broader types of research methodology, let’s look at some more specific types of research designs.

● Experimental research design – This research design measures the relationships between variables. It has a dependent and independent variable and can be quantitative or qualitative.
● Descriptive research design – Descriptive research is theory-based and tries to answer questions about why and how research was performed
● Diagnostic research design – If you’re looking for the cause of a phenomenon, a diagnostic research design can help identify the cause and solution.
● Correlational research design – Correlational research aims to learn the relationship of two closely-related variables.
● Explanatory research design – This research design explores and furthers the existing ideas of a researcher. It addresses questions left unanswered by the original research.

No matter what type of research question you are trying to answer, there is a research design that will do the job. While research is never completely unbiased, choosing the right research methodology is a key step to ensuring that your work is the highest quality possible. If you do not choose the right research design, you won’t be able to get the data and answers that you need.