Design and Structure of Research

1. Design and Structure of Research Dr. Syed Rifaat Hussain

2. What is Research Design? • Research design consists of the procedures by which researchers go about their work of describing, explaining and predicting phenomena.

3. Major components of Research Design • The research question. • The Theory. • The data • Use of data

4. Choosing a topic • Individual preferences. • All research projects must satisfy two criteria: • 1. It should pose a question that is “important” in a real world. The topic should be consequential for political, social, or economic life, for understanding and predicting events that might be harmful or beneficial.

5. Choosing a topic….contd • 2. A research project should make a specific contribution to an identifiable scholarly literature by increasing our collective ability to construct verified scientific explanations of some aspects of the world.

6. What is contribution to knowledge?

7. Improving theory and data • Choose theories that could be wrong. • Choose the one that is capable of generating as many observable implications as possible. • In designing theories be as concrete as possible. • Test theories under auxiliary statements

8. Improving Data • Data are systematically collected elements of information about the world. • Record and report the process by which the data are generated. • Collect data on all possible observable implications of your theory. • Maximise the validity of your measurements • Ensure that data collection methods are reliable. • All data and analyses should be replicable

9. Improving the use of existing data • Use data to generate inferences that are unbiased. • Efficiency: maximize the information used for descriptive or causal inference. • Specify causal mechanism and conditions under which data predictions would hold.

10. Purpose of the research design

11. Steps of the Research Design

12. Types of Research Designs • Qualitative or Descriptive • Quantitative

13. Qualitative and Quantitative Research Designs Compared

14. Descriptive Research • How do adolescents spend their time?

15. Questions raised by Descriptive Research

16. Correlational Research • Example: Are children’s friendships related to their relationships with their siblings?

17. Interpretation • Affective experience • Emotional support • Working through issues • Particular child characteristics

18. Experimental Research • Example: • Does drawing improve improve children’s memory for an event?

19. Experimental Design • Random assignment • Random sampling rare • Representative sampling • Selection bias • Subjective variables

20. Measures: • Independent variable: • drawing vs telling alone • Dependent variable: • memory performance

21. Example:

23. Pre-design decisions

24. Choosing a topic

25. How do I do it?

26. Data collection decisions

27. Data Analysis Decisions