Research Design

It is best practice to start with a question to guide your research.

Having a question will help limit the amount of literature you look through to get a foundation for your research. Think of a specific research question that can be answered ethically. Many researchers use their own life experiences to help develop research questions. However, many research questions can be influenced and built upon questions other researchers have already answered.

Keep in mind that the question you are asking should address an important issue and should be worth the time and money to study.

It is best practice to start with a question to guide your research. Once you have a question, search through published research articles to make sure that your research question hasn’t already been answered by other researchers.

If your specific question has already been studied extensively, how can you expand or improve previous research studies? For instance, suppose you were interested in whether help-seeking attitudes are associated with help-seeking behaviour and the majority of researchers have used medical patients as their participants.

You may want to expand this research by testing whether help-seeking attitudes are correlated with help-seeking behaviour, but using a university student population. If your topic has not been studied, or there is little research in that specific area, search through articles that are closely related to your topic to get an idea of other researcher’s methodology.

You need a hypothesis before you find participants and collect data.

A hypothesis is a testable statement derived from your research question.

For instance, suppose your research question was “Do help-seeking attitudes influence help-seeking behaviour?” From this particular research question, you may propose that positive help-seeking attitudes will be correlated with more help-seeking behaviour, while negative help-seeking attitudes will be correlated with less help-seeking behaviour.

It is important to note that your hypothesis should be supported by theory and previous empirical research and should not come from thin air.

You need a hypothesis before you gather participants and collect data.

Once you have a hypothesis you can determine what type of sample your participants will come from (university students, mental health patients, mental health workers, retired firefighters, etc.) and this will usually depend on your research question. It is important to note that researchers must follow ethical protocols developed by the ethics committee from the institution you are conducting research under.

You cannot coerce or pressure participants into completing your study, they must voluntarily choose to participate or be given some sort of compensation for participating in your research.

You need to analyze the data before you can interpret it.

Once you have analyzed your results you will be able to determine whether your results support your hypotheses.

You need to analyze the data before you can interpret it.

For this step you need to use the correct statistical analyses for the study you conducted. This will provide you with data that can then be interpreted.

Comparing comes before contemplation.

After your research study has been completed and results have been interpreted and compared with other studies, you should determine what the next research question is.

For example, were there any limitations to your study that could be addressed in another study?

Comparing comes before contemplation.

Compare your results to other similar studies. Have other researchers found similar results?

If your results are opposite of what other researchers have found, speculate why you may have found your results (was your sample size different? Did you use different statistical analyses?)