Now that you’ve figured out what to study, you need to figure out how to study it. Your library research can help in this regard. Reading published studies is a great way to familiarize yourself with the various components of a research project. It will also bring to your attention some of the major considerations to keep in mind when designing a research project. We’ll say more about reviewing the literature later, but we’ll begin with a focus on research design. We’ll discuss the decisions you need to make about the goals of your research, the major components of a research project, along with a few additional aspects of designing research.

Goals of the Research Project

I have a 9-year-old daughter, whose grandparents recently bought her an iPad. As she has immersed herself with gusto, I have had any number of questions swirling around in my head. What sorts of gadgets are kids drawn to, or to what uses? How much is too much, and why? Do attitudes or behaviours of heavy users differ from those who are light users? How does a potential dependency develop, and who is most likely to experience one?

Social research is great for answering just these sorts of questions, but in order to answer our questions well, we must take care in designing our research projects. In this chapter, we’ll consider what aspects of a research project should be considered at the beginning, including specifying the goals of the research, the components that are common across most research projects, and a few other considerations.

One of the first things to think about when designing a research project is what you hope to accomplish, in very general terms, by conducting the research. What do you hope to be able to say about your topic? Do you hope to gain a deep understanding of whatever phenomenon it is that you’re studying, or would you rather have a broad, but perhaps less deep, understanding? Do you want your research to be used by policymakers or others to shape social life, or is this project more about exploring your curiosities? Your answers to each of these questions will shape your research design.

Exploration, Description, Explanation

You’ll need to decide in the beginning phases whether your research will be exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory. Each has a different purpose, so how you design your research project will be determined in part by this decision.

Researchers conducting exploratory research are typically at the early stages of examining their topics. These sorts of projects are usually conducted when a researcher wants to test the feasibility of conducting a more extensive study; he or she wants to figure out the lay of the land, with respect to the particular topic. Perhaps very little prior research has been conducted on this subject. If this is the case, a researcher may wish to do some exploratory work to learn what method to use in collecting data, how best to approach research subjects, or even what sorts of questions are reasonable to ask. In the case of studying young people’s dependency on their electronic gadgets, a researcher conducting exploratory research on this topic may simply wish to learn more about students’ use of these gadgets. Because these dependencies seem to be a relatively new phenomenon, an exploratory study of the topic might make sense as an initial first step toward understanding it. As a further example, in my research on gentrification and adolescents, I was unsure what the results might be when first embarking on the study. There was very little empirical research on the topic, so the initial goal of the research was simply to explore how adolescents living in a gentrifying community perceived changes to their community, and how this may have affected their use of the community’s resources. Conducting exploratory research on the topic was a necessary first step to understand the phenomenon better, in order to design a more tightly focused study subsequently.

Sometimes the goal of research is to describe or define a particular phenomenon. In this case, descriptive research would be an appropriate strategy. A descriptive study of university students’ addictions to their electronic gadgets, for example, might aim to describe patterns in how use of gadgets varies by gender or university major or which sorts of gadgets students tend to use most regularly.

One example of descriptive research with which most of us are familiar are course evaluations. At least in pre- COVID days, students completed course evaluations at the end of each semester, and the consolidated results provided descriptive data about students’ perceptions of assigned materials, the knowledge, abilities, and availability of their instructor, and their overall level of satisfaction with a course. These allow instructors to understand what they may be doing well, and what aspects may use improvement.

Finally, social science researchers often aim to explain why particular phenomena work in the way that they do. Research that answers “why” questions is referred to as explanatory research. In this case, the researcher is trying to identify the causes and effects of whatever phenomenon he or she is studying. An explanatory study of university students’ addictions to their electronic gadgets might aim to understand why students become addicted. Does it have anything to do with their family histories? With their other extracurricular hobbies and activities? With whom they spend their time? An explanatory study could answer these kinds of questions.

There are numerous examples of explanatory social scientific investigations. For example, Simons and Wurtele (2010) sought to discover whether receiving corporal punishment from parents led children to turn to violence in solving their interpersonal conflicts with other children. In their study of 102 families with children between the ages of 3 and 7, the researchers found that experiencing frequent spanking did, in fact, result in children being more likely to accept aggressive problem-solving techniques.

Another example of explanatory research can be seen in Faris and Felmlee’s research (2011; American Sociological Association, 2011) on the connections between popularity and bullying. They found, from their study of 8th, 9th, and 10th graders in 19 North Carolina schools, that as adolescents’ popularity increases, so, too, does their aggression.

Idiographic or Nomothetic?

Once you decide whether you will conduct exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory research, you will need to determine whether you want your research to be idiographic or nomothetic. A decision to conduct idiographic research means that you will attempt to explain or describe your phenomenon exhaustively. While you might have to sacrifice some breadth of understanding if you opt for an idiographic explanation, you will gain a deep, rich understanding of whatever phenomenon or group you are studying. In most cases, idiographic research falls to qualitative researchers, who seek far greater depth of understanding but who sacrifice generalizability due to the generally limited number of research participants. A decision to conduct nomothetic research, on the other hand, means that you will aim to provide a more general, sweeping explanation or description of your topic. In this case, you sacrifice depth of understanding in favor of breadth of understanding, while increasing the generality of the findings.

Applied or Basic?

Finally, you will need to decide what sort of contribution you hope to make with your research. Do you want others to be able to use your research to shape social life? If so, you may wish to conduct a study that policymakers could use to change or create a specific policy. Perhaps, on the other hand, you wish to conduct a study that will contribute to theories or knowledge without having a specific applied use in mind. In the example of my daughter’s burgeoning addiction to technological gadgets, an applied study of this topic might aim to understand how to treat such addictions. A basic study of the same topic, on the other hand, might examine existing theories of addiction and consider how this new type of addiction does or does not apply; perhaps your study could suggest ways that such theories may be tweaked to encompass technological addictions.

Earlier, we learned about both applied and basic research. When designing your research project, think about where you envision your work fitting in on the applied–basic continuum. Recognize, however, that even basic research may ultimately be used for some applied purpose. Similarly, your applied research might not turn out to be applicable to the particular real-world social problem you were trying to solve, but it might better our theoretical understanding of some phenomenon. In other words, deciding now whether your research will be basic or applied doesn’t mean that will be its sole purpose forever. Basic research may ultimately be applied, and applied research can certainly contribute to general knowledge. Nevertheless, it is important to think in advance about what contribution(s) you hope to make with your research.

We have discussed the importance of understanding the differences between qualitative and quantitative research methods. Because this distinction is relevant to how researchers design their projects, we’ll revisit it here.