Research Overview

Summary - Constructing an experimental design

1. Choose a research topic
2. Conduct a literature review
3. Formulate a research problem
4. Articulate the hypothesis to be tested
5. Choose a variable to study
6. Select study participants
7. Assign participants to groups
8. Identify sampling design
9. Conduct the actual study

How to conduct research

Decide what to research

1. Identify your research topic
2. Research the Literature
3. Write a lit review
4. Formulate a question

Plan the Research

1. Develop and refine the research design
2. Decide the type of data and how to collect it
3. Plan a data collection strategy

Conduct the research

1. Collect the data
2. Process, analyse and visualise the data
3. Interpret the data
4. Write and publish the data
5. Write a research proposal

A research topic is a general broad field of interests. A research question is a specific component within the research topic

A research question should focus on a small subset of the overall research field.

Basic vs applied research

Basic research stands to ask fundamental questions about the nature of things, where as applied research takes that basic research and uses it to answer technological questions.

Parameters	Basic Research	Applied Research
Type of knowledge produced	Scientific discovery (science)	Technological Applications (technology)
Motivation	Intellectual curiosity	Solving real world problems
Key Questions	Why does it happen? Is it true that…?	Does it work? Can we use this to…?
Objective	To understand	To come up with solutions

Applied research is more likely to get research from governments and industry, since they’re more likely to present immediate economic value, however basic research is vital to be able to develop applied research.