Research Design

Research design is the overall plan connecting your research questions to your data and analysis. It specifies the approach, the strategy, the time horizon, the sampling plan and the analytical techniques — the architecture of the study rather than any single method within it.

The main families are descriptive designs, which document characteristics as they are; correlational designs, which examine relationships without manipulation; experimental and quasi-experimental designs, which manipulate a variable to test causal effects; and exploratory designs, which investigate poorly understood phenomena.

Design follows from the question rather than preference. A question asking how prevalent something is calls for a descriptive survey; one asking whether an intervention works calls for an experiment; one asking how people experience something calls for a qualitative design. Justify the choice explicitly and acknowledge what the design cannot establish.