This text deals with the subject of research methodology on a comprehensive level and briefly discusses what to consider when you are a higher education student who is about to write a paper. All the information was collected from the sources given at the bottom of the page.
What is research?
In a very simplified manner, research can be described as the search for and development of new knowledge. By systematically and methodically investigating the credibility of a theory with a critical attitude you extract new knowledge.
Different types of projects
There are quite many different types of projects where you should come into contact with the concept research methodology, e.g. research, investigation projects, development projects or quality investigations. It is perhaps not always easy to draw the line between these different types, but it facilitates your further work with the research methodology to begin with establishing what type of project you have ahead, because the choice of project can affect the choice of research method.
Choice of research method
You often distinguish between two different methodological ways to tackle research. The two methods are based on whether it is “soft” or “hard” data that is investigated and they are called qualitative, respectively quantitative methods. There is no real competition between these two methods, but rather they have different strong and weak points. Because of this they are suitable for different research situations. To put it simply you could say that the choice of research method can be controlled by what way and to what extent you want to work with numbers and statistics. The basic idea though, is that the choice of problem, after a review of the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods, should control the choice of method.
Qualitative methods
Qualitative methods are suitable when you want to get a deeper understanding of a problem or phenomenon. It is not so much about deciding whether the result is possible to generalize, but rather to get a deeper understanding combined with an understanding of the context of the problem/phenomenon. The qualitative methods are signified by a closeness to the information sources and therefore different types of interviews are good examples of this method.
Quantitative methods
As opposed to the qualitative methods, quantitative methods are signified by a high degree of formalization and structure. The researcher has considerably higher control of the research situation and the methods decide in advance what possible answers there can be for questions about the chosen problem. The researcher has a distance to the information sources and selects these sources well. Quantitative methods are thus well suited for formalized analyses, comparisons and the possibility of generalization in combination with statistical measuring methods. One example of a quantitative method is questionnaire investigations.
The research process
Regardless of what you decide to investigate you must go through a number of steps in the research process. First and foremost, you must identify and acquire knowledge about the problem (literary survey), then you need to specify the problem and find out what it is you want to investigate.
The figure shows how the problem is successively delimited through the literary survey and how it is finally possible to specify:
After this you need to make your mind up about how you are going to investigate the specific problem. How is the actual investigation going to be organized and what techniques for information gathering are you going to use? After this step the realization starts, whereupon processing and analysis follows, and last but not least accounting and reporting.
Read more:
Search ebrary for books about research methodology.
Annika Lindquist
2005-01-15
