Planning the details of your project (part 1 of 2)

Now that you have a research question, you can begin to plan the details of your research project. This will require a lot of decisions on your part, so to guide you, I will be mostly asking questions in this post in order to help you consider options and make these decisions.

• How will your proposed methodology answer the research question you’ve developed? You might already have the research methodology developed (or a good sense of it) if you’re replicating something that has already been published. If not, then what kind of methodology will you use? Surveys? Some kind of active manipulation (some students get X and other students get Y and then you compare them on some outcome variable)?
• How will you develop a study/procedure to actually answer your research question? Generally, if your research question is narrow enough, you will only need to collect data on a couple of variables (plus maybe some demographics characteristics to describe your sample and be able to make some generalizable statements about the outcomes). Think about what kind of evidence would allow you to make the claim that you (tentatively) hypothesized last month. For example, compared to a baseline score, if scores go up when I do X, but they go back down when I do Y, I can be pretty confident that what I am changing affects the scores.
• Specifically, what data will you be collecting as part of this research project, or, do you already have the data you need from a previous semester (secondary use)?
• In terms of preparing your study, has it been done before or do you have to develop everything from scratch (e.g., survey questions)?
• Sample size is something else you’ll want to consider- how many people should you aim for in your research project? Some of your answer will depend on whether you’re approaching your question qualitatively or quantitatively (which will then affect how you analyze the data you collect, but I’ll share more on that later). But the method you use in your inquiry will also contribute to this.

Next month, we’ll continue looking at planning the details of your research project.