Research Design Types

Research involves covering the known knowledge frontier in your research problem, designing experiments/surveys, collecting and processing data, analyzing it and arriving at useful conclusions which validate a proposed theory, disapprove a known theory or create a new theoretical framework. This definition of research is not all encompassing but I think it covers the essentials. Be it a research project in any field, one of the most important steps before beginning research is deciding on your research design. Your research methodology or design is the way in which you plan to approach the research subject, collect data, analyze it and study the research problem.

Selecting Research Design

There are as many research methods, as there are research problems. Types of designs are dependent on many different factors including the nature of research problem, field of research, depth of required detail and its objective.

To make the best choice, you need to state your research objective clearly. Your objective will decide what information you need to proceed and how you are going to go about collecting and analyzing it. If it is a scientific research project, then you need to think about designing experiments to prove your point. If it is a research project in social studies, a major part is creating a survey questionnaire and exploring channels of information related to the topic. Psychology research methods fall in this category.

Characteristics of Research Designs

Be it research of any form and in any field, every one of the methodologies has some things in similar. One is the literature review of the subject matter till that point. This covers the known frontier of knowledge in this field and involves the review of published research papers related to the research problem at hand. Next is the development of a causal line of thinking that proves the research objective and a program of gathering evidence to back it up. Last part is of course drawing conclusions from the researched data.

Types of Research Methodologies in Various Fields

It is not possible for me to list all the major research methodologies in various fields, as they are numerous.

Psychology
Three of the main types in psychology are the following:

• Causal: The causal approach goes about analyzing the problem through 'cause and effect' line of reasoning. A mention must be made of the connection between exploratory formalized and causal design. Exploratory type starts out with no clear objective but analyzes known results for possible research clues which ultimately lead to causative reasoning.
• Descriptive: This approach consists of purely describing the state of things as they are and employs polls and surveys as part of information gathering mechanism.
• Relational: Two or more separate properties of a population group are probed for connections or relations through surveys and investigation.

Marketing
Marketing research is aimed at the singular objective of increasing sales of a product through marketing research. Here are the two main types of research design in the marketing field.

• Qualitative: Information gathered is of qualitative nature and focus is on gathering data from specific focus groups and in depth interviews.
• Quantitative: Uses polls, surveys and mass media for gathering of consumer related data. Quantitative details are more focused upon and statistical techniques are used for analysis.

Scientific
Research in any kind of scientific field like chemistry, physics, biology or medicine follows two design types, which are the following:

• Analytical: This type of design focuses on theoretical lines, to solve the problem.
• Experimental: This approach focuses on designing experiments to verify theoretical models.

Combinations of both these approaches leads to an effective research methodology. Ultimately you choose one from the various design types or a combination of two or more types that suits your research objective.