Carrying out a research project can be a Herculean endeavor – the first step to succeed is establishing your research questions, goals, and methodologies. These essential choices will have a massive impact on not only the research process, but most probably the results as well. What are the factors that can influence a research project?
Types of research: quantitative vs. qualitative methods
There are several research types you’ll have to choose from to conduct your research with, along with a matching methodology. Whether you will choose quantitative, qualitative, or mixed approach will have a huge influence on your whole research project.
Quantitative research
Quantitative research methods are one of the two most basic types of scientific research. These methodologies are based on numbers – large amounts of data that establish trends and statistics, collected with surveys, questionnaires, experiments, and other similar methods. The objective of quantitative research is to analyze causal relationships between variables, confirmed by a significant data sample.
This type of research can produce objective data, and its results are clearly visible through charts, statistics, and numbers in general. They can be easily reproduced and are hard to disprove, but they are more restrictive than other research types. You’ll also need a significant sample of respondents to gather enough data, which can be difficult to organize.
Qualitative research
In contrast, qualitative research methods deal with data that can’t be expressed in a numerical form. This includes gathering interviews, studying personal records and historical accounts, analyzing documents, and conducting focus groups, among other methods of gathering data. Qualitative research is often semi-structured or unstructured, which allows researchers to ask open-ended questions without an implied answer, following where it may lead them.
Qualitative methods allow much more creativity and room for interpretation. The whole research process is much more flexible and can be adjusted as needed – changing your questions and research process in quantitative research would cause much more chaos. However, qualitative methods are vulnerable to subjective interpretations, and researchers need to continually manage their personal biases. Qualitative data collection is also more expensive and time-consuming than with quantitative methods.
Practical limitations: time, money, access to information
Your research methods aren’t the only thing that could influence your project – there will always be practical limitations that you’ll need to manage.
Time is the most problematic limitation – you’ll have to manage how in-depth your study will be to maintain feasibility. Detail-oriented studies could take years to finish, especially if you’re doing primary research yourself. Depending on your budget and available resources, you might have to reduce the scope of your research to avoid the project stretching forever and never being finished.
In-depth research is also costly, which becomes problematic when you have to manage work and research separately to keep afloat – it can severely slow down your research project. Researchers apply for government and private grants to help them fund research, but actually receiving one is often difficult and requires tangible proof of results.
Depending on where in the world you’re located and what your social situation is, your access to information will vary. The Internet has partially solved this problem by granting access to online resources – but not all places on earth have equal access to electricity, let alone the Internet. This can make conducting research significantly more difficult and increases the risk of performing a study that has already been performed with the same methodology before.
