Research methodology

Steps to develop your research methodology

Use the following prompts to apply the concepts to your own research.

Step 1: Clarify what you are trying to find out

Ask:

  • Am I measuring, comparing, testing, predicting or explaining?
  • Am I exploring experiences, interpretations, practices or meanings?
  • Am I trying to do more than one of these?

Step 2: Examine your assumptions about the phenomenon

Ask:

  • Do I think there is an objective truth about this phenomenon waiting to be discovered?
  • Do I think it is shaped by context, culture and individual experience?
  • Do I think it is a combination of the above?

Step 3: Decide what would count as knowledge

Ask:

  • What would a convincing answer look like?
  • What evidence would support it?
  • What could participants reasonably know and report?
  • What might require observation, measurement, records or comparison?
  • Would I trust a large dataset or a rich personal account more, and why?

Step 4: Review disciplinary traditions

Ask:

  • What approaches are common in my field?
  • How have researchers investigating similar questions designed their studies?
  • What assumptions do those studies make?
  • Have researchers challenged established approaches, and how have they justified doing so?

Disciplinary conventions matter, but they are not automatically decisive. A less common approach may be suitable if it is well justified.

Step 5: Select and justify a methodology

Rather than asking only, “Which methodology is normally used?”, ask:

  • What overall design can generate the type of knowledge my question requires?
  • What alternatives did I consider?
  • Why is this design more suitable than those alternatives?

Step 6: Choose methods that serve the design

For each method, be able to explain:

  • what data it will generate;
  • what role those data will play;
  • why the method is appropriate for the participants or materials;
  • how the data will be analysed; and
  • what the method cannot establish on its own and how the rest of the design addresses this.

Step 7: Match your quality criteria to your claims

Different studies use different language for research quality. Depending on the approach, you may discuss:

  • validity and reliability;
  • credibility and dependability;
  • generalisability or transferability;
  • triangulation or corroboration;
  • reflexivity;
  • transparency;
  • attention to alternative explanations; or
  • ethical and relational accountability.

Explain how your study will meet the standards relevant to the kind of knowledge it seeks to produce.

Step 8: Revisit and refine

Research design is iterative. Reading, feasibility work, ethical considerations, supervisory discussion or early data collection may expose tensions in the design. Revising the question or methodology is part of developing a stronger project.