Research methods are specific procedures for collecting and analyzing data. Therefore, your research methods form the most critical part of your research design. You must make two crucial decisions during your method planning.
Research methods are specific procedures for collecting and analyzing data. Your research methods form the most critical part of your research design. You must make two crucial decisions during your method planning. The first one involves how you gather data. The data may be qualitative or quantitative, primary or secondary, and descriptive or experimental. Qualitative or quantitative data imply whether your data involve numbers or words. Primary versus secondary data suggest if you will gather the data or use the data already collected by someone else. Descriptive data involve taking measurements as it is, while experimental data include experimenting. The second one consists in deciding how you will analyze the data. You may resort to statistical methods to explore the relationships between the variables for quantitative data. In contrast, you can use methods, including thematic analysis, to infer models and implications in the data for qualitative ones.
You collect data to address your research question. The aims of your research determine what type of data you will gather. Assume you wish to answer questions about ideas, experiences, or meanings. In that case, you must collect qualitative data. However, you need to gather quantitative data to build a systematic understanding of a topic or if your study is about hypothesis testing. Qualitative data are flexible and can involve small samples.
Nonetheless, statistical analysis is improbable, and research standardization is challenging. Quite to the contrary, quantitative data have a broader scope and can generate reproducible knowledge. On the negative side, they demand statistical training for data analysis and require much larger samples.
You may also choose a mixed method. In that case, you employ both qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Primary data include original information you gather to address your research question using surveys, observations, or experiments. Conversely, secondary data are information already collected by other researchers, such as previous scientific studies and governmental statistics.
Suppose you wish to explore a novel research question. In that case, what you need is to amass primary data. However, secondary data may require synthesizing extant knowledge, analyzing historical trends, or specifying models on a large scale.
Primary data can help you answer specific research questions, and you can employ sampling and measurement methods. However, data collection may be time-consuming and costly. Moreover, you need training before data collection.
You can readily access secondary data. They can include information from broader areas and timescales. Nonetheless, you almost have no idea how data have been gathered, and you may need to modify them to fit your research purposes.
Suppose you gather data about your research without intervening. In that case, you will have descriptive data. Remember that your sampling method will determine the validity of your study. Conversely, in experimental research, you are more active and take the initiative to intervene systematically in a process and meter its outcome. Your experimental design will be the determiner of your research validity.
When experimenting, you control the levels of your independent variable (x). This control will provide you with the precise measurement of your independent variable (y). Please notice that you should be able to control any confounding variable. If you can ensure them all, you can address the questions about cause and effect.
With descriptive data, you can describe your research subject without affecting it and collect big data. However, no control exists for confounding variables, and you cannot study cause-and-effect relationships. On the contrary, experimental data allow you to have more control over confounding variables, and you can build a cause-and-effect relationship. On the negative side, you might unexpectedly affect your research subject and need more extraordinary expertise and resources to gather the data.
Best Edit & Proof expert editors and proofreaders focus on offering papers with proper tone, content, and style of academic writing, and also provide an upscale editing and proofreading service for you. If you consider our pieces of advice, you will witness a notable increase in the chance for your research manuscript to be accepted by the publishers. We work together as an academic writing style guide by bestowing subject-area editing and proofreading around several categorized writing styles. With the group of our expert editors, you will always find us all set to help you identify the tone and style that your manuscript needs to get a nod from the publishers.
You can also avail of our assistance if you are looking for editors who can format your manuscript, or just check on the particular styles for the formatting task as per the guidelines provided to you, e.g., APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian styles. Best Edit & Proof editors and proofreaders provide all sorts of academic writing help, including editing and proofreading services, using our user-friendly website, and a streamlined ordering process.
Visit our order page if you want our subject-area editors or language experts to work on your manuscript to improve its tone and style and give it a perfect academic tone and style through proper editing and proofreading. The process of submitting a paper is very easy and quick. Click here to find out how it works.
Our pricing is based on the type of service you avail of here, be it editing or proofreading. We charge on the basis of the word count of your manuscript that you submit for editing and proofreading and the turnaround time it takes to get it done. If you want to get an instant price quote for your project, copy and paste your document or enter your word count into our pricing calculator.
Contact us to get support with academic editing and proofreading. We have a 24/7 active live chat mode to offer you direct support along with qualified editors to refine and furbish your manuscript.
Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Medium.
For more posts, click here.
This article explains how to build research methods for a dissertation or thesis. To give you an opportunity to practice proofreading, we have left a few spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors in the text. See if you can spot them! If you spot the errors correctly, you will be entitled to a 10% discount.
How to Determine Variability in a Dataset
14.10.2023
Population vs Sample | Sampling Methods for a Dissertation
14.01.2023
7 Issues to Avoid That may Dent the Quality of Thesis Writing
18.12.2022
How to Ensure the Quality of Academic Writing in a Thesis and Dissertation?
04.12.2022
How to Define Population and Sample in a Dissertation?
03.12.2022
How can You Establish Experimental Design in Your Dissertation?
12.11.2022
How Can You Decide on Tense Usage in Your Dissertation?
04.11.2022
How Can You Write an Abstract for Your Dissertation?
30.10.2022
How to Build a Strong Hypothesis for Your Dissertation
13.10.2022
How Can You Develop Solid Research Questions for Your Dissertation?
13.10.2022
The dissertation writing process is a lengthy, extensive and multi-faceted undertaking spanning several months (or even years). It is an exacting exercise comprising several steps, each with its own requisites that scholars need to fulfill duly. Hence, regardless of how strategic and meticulous a scholar's dissertation writing approach is, there are bound to be certain inconsistencies - grammatical errors, incoherent phrasing, inappropriate synonyms, formatting errors, etc., - even in the final draft.
Continue Reading
Writing a thesis can be an overwhelming task for many college and graduate students. Managing all the elements associated with a thesis while ensuring that the quality is not compromised can be challenging. However, what is even more strenuous is deciding on a thesis's layout. "How to structure a thesis" is a question that several final-year students struggle to answer. And understandably so, as all colleges and universities have their guidelines for drafting a thesis. However, there is an immutable structure that's common for every thesis. In this brief guide, we will take a look at this structure and analyze each of its components.
Continue Reading
After gathering and analyzing your data, next is penning the results. You report the primary findings of your study in this section. The most critical issue is that reporting your results must be concise and pursue a logical order.
Continue Reading
Scholars must write a research proposal to receive funding to support their projects and provide their graduate students with the needed funds to pursue post-graduate studies. Even you, as a student, may have to write one before you begin your thesis or dissertation. Whatever the objective is, one issue remains the most relevant.
Continue Reading
After successfully specifying your project’s research problem, penning a problem statement pursues. Two crucial properties of an efficient problem statement are its conciseness and tangibility.
Continue Reading
A hypothesis is a testable statement on which scientific research focus. Suppose you wish to investigate a relationship between two or more variables. In that case, you must construct hypotheses before you begin your experiment or data collection.
Continue Reading
When you deal with experiments, you investigate the causal relationship between variables. What you fundamentally do is manipulate one or more than one independent variable (x) to determine their effect on dependent variables (y).
Continue Reading