The Research Experience. Ann Sloan Devlin

      Chapter 3 Research Design Approaches and Issues: An Overview

      Chapter highlights

      Overview

      This chapter introduces basic concepts and considerations regarding research design and the kinds of research questions that can be answered, depending on your approach. More detailed information about specific designs will come in Chapters 7–10. Fundamental to understanding what research can tell you is the degree of certainty about the results, in particular, the distinction between a study with correlational results and one where causality can be inferred. Moreover, although different research approaches (e.g., experimental and quasi-experimental design) may use the same statistical analyses, what can be claimed about the results is not the same. In designing a research study, there may be many threats to internal validity, that is, whether the design is adequate to answer your research question and evaluate any hypotheses. This chapter will cover those threats to internal validity, talk again about external validity (i.e., generalizability or how broadly the findings can be applied; see Chapter 2), and about two kinds of errors: Type I error (claiming a result was significant when you should not have done so; also called a “false alarm” or a “false positive”) and Type II error (not claiming a result as significant when you should have; also called a “miss” or a “false negative”). Aspects of the study that relate to the roles of both the researcher and the participant will be covered, as well as ways to do preliminary testing of your study (pilot studies and manipulation checks). The chapter will briefly describe the different settings in which research takes place, from the laboratory to the field. By the end of the chapter, you should be well versed in the fundamentals of research that apply across different types of research designs.

      At the end of this book, Appendix A (Figure A.1) presents a decision tree to help guide which statistical approach should be used for which kind of research question, and Appendix G presents a table of the statistical analyses in terms of the scale types that are used in common research designs. You may find these appendices helpful to consult throughout the research process.

      Research Quality Affects Research Answers

      Good research involves asking worthwhile questions that combine tradition and innovation, as illustrated in Chapter 2. Good research also involves selecting an approach that is appropriate for the question(s) you want to answer. Some research questions can be answered with a high degree of certainty; others cannot. In some instances, researchers are interested in what might be called exploratory research; they want to gain a preliminary understanding of a topic and may not formulate specific hypotheses. Often, researchers use interviews, focus groups, and case studies in such research. These approaches are usually described as qualitative and will be discussed more fully in Chapter 8.

      Experimental design: Research approach with manipulated variables and random assignment.

      Quasi-experimental design: Research approach that resembles experimental research but is based on the use of preexisting groups (quasi-independent variables [IVs]).

      Internal validity: Extent to which a research design allows you to test the hypothesis adequately.

      Type I error: Incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true.

      Whatever your goal and approach, the manner in which you conduct the research affects its quality. As a number of authors have pointed out, simply doing a large and well-funded study does not guarantee that the research questions will be appropriately framed (see R. Kaplan, 1996). Even in exploratory qualitative research where you are trying to get a sense of the issues that matter to people (e.g., reactions to building high-rise, high-density housing near a neighborhood park), many aspects of your approach, such as the facility where the questions are asked and who is included in the interviews, can affect how people respond. This chapter will emphasize quantitative approaches, but many of the same issues dealing with the internal validity of your research (whether the design enables you to answer the research questions) apply to qualitative research as well.

      What Research Can Tell You: The Continuum of Certainty

      The degree of control you exercise in conducting your research is usually related to the level of certainty you can have in your results—greater control is related to greater certainty. On one end of the research continuum, we do not manipulate any variable; if we want to quantify people’s answers (i.e., quantitative approaches), we typically ask people to answer