Tutorial 6 Research Design

0:00 hello everyone as promised in the previous tutorial um in this tutorial we talk about research design in the next one too but now i would like to cover some of the basics some of the things you need to consider when you are thinking about research design for instance if you opt not to use one of the well-known blueprint type designs but you will design your own study um in the way of giving a systematic discussion these types of considerations we are talking about in this tutorial those are the things you need to address in such a systematic discussion now also mentioned before um some of these concentrations you will

0:47 have already heard in um when we talked about research problems and research general research approaches but but as i've also said before these things are so intertwined that you that you cannot really separate them out so they will be overlap and they will be maybe a repeat of something you've heard before um if if there's such an overlap for you just see that as a reminder that these things are um are to be considered all together now all right for today um as uh in the introduction in tutorial four the research design is like the framework for the research methods the pro procedures and the techniques used for data collection it is it is where

1:35 your paradigm your problem your theory everything comes together in the form of research practice so this is where the rubber hits the road um as a matter of fact whatever your research design ends up looking like you must make sure that you account for your methodological decisions and provide sufficient detail and proof of your competence so that whoever reads or examines your work will believe that you used an appropriate feasible framework that will allow you to reach conclusions that are in line with your problem your context your world view to reach satisfying conclusion in other words some of the core dimensions of your design include its compatibility with your philosophical position the scholarly

2:21 let's say location of your study compatibility with your research questions and objectives the nature of the data the control over the research environment compatibility with your research approach the use of theory and the time dimension let's look at these um one by one as you've heard many times before in these tutorials your philosophical stance directs many of your methodological decisions so when you are designing your research the fit between philosophy approach and design should be considered some research designs are strongly associated with specific paradigmatic positions or approaches while others might be built on specific ontological or epistemological assumptions

3:07 for example participatory action research is strongly linked to the transformative and critical positions while experimental design are built on a realist ontology other label designs could be compatible with various philosophical positions like the case study design but case study design includes the assumption of various research methods so here your research approach is part of your design decision if you are using a labeled research design you will find information on the links between that design strategy and meta theory in literature on that type of research but when you are putting together your own design it's up to you

3:52 to ensure that your plan is aligned to your philosophical beliefs and your general methodological orientation next up is thinking about where your study is located we usually differentiate between two types here empirical research and non-empirical research also called applied research versus basic research now don't confuse empirical research with empiricism as in the philosophical epistemological assumption often associated with positivism well empiricism is a philosophical concept empirical refers to a moment in time in a research project as in the empirical phase the phase of execution

4:37 or the type of study that is called empirical research or applied research it is research about real world problems and questions while non-empirical basic research is about scholarly questions if you can remember the three world framework empirical questions are problems um and phenomena from world one our world of our everyday lives empirical designs are most common in organizational communication because our discipline is closely linked to an applied context as in the real organizations so empirical designs are made to answer exploratory descriptive causal evaluative predictive and historical questions these are all questions about

5:23 the world of our everyday lives and phenomena from our world if you want to ask questions about the real world uh you are doing empirical research and then you need to either collect new data or use existing data on your topic non-empirical designs are for studies that ask questions about research theory philosophy research ethics in a specific field these questions can be answered without considering what is happening in the real world some non-empirical research designs include conceptual studies philosophical studies and literature-based research now it's not that non-empirical research is not noteworthy but the rest of this tutorial and the rest of the video

6:09 tutorials made by me is mostly about empirical research now just as you have to check your design plans against your philosophical position you have to carefully consider your research questions and objectives the whole project is about answering your research questions so of course those are important in tutorial eight we will talk about the technicalities of formulating a research problem statement research questions research objectives and so on but usually we express specific objectives of a research project as either exploratory now exploratory objectives are used for research in an unknown context or about an unknown phenomenon

6:54 or research that hopes to gain new insight or in many instances it's also used as a starting point for research in order to get to understand the key concepts or key issues key stakeholders key needs or whatever before you perhaps design a quantitative measuring instrument also the script of research is about describing the phenomenon you are studying or certain characteristics of that phenomenon as accurately as possible and in detail correlation research is about establishing relationships between variables explanatory research is linked to correlation research but explanatory start studies look for the reasons for

7:39 those relationships between variables so the question why this relationship exists is an explanatory question if a study has predictive objectives it is forward-looking so it uses information on the relationships between variables to predict human behavior of in the future for instance or organizational behavior in the future some research is done specifically with the intention to critique a specific practice that is called a critical objective then research can also be about taking action and then it will have the objective to actually make a change in the world and those are usually referred to as change or transformational type of

8:25 objectives when you are designing your study you must make super sure that your research will enable you to answer the questions you asked some types of research are just plainly incapable of answering certain questions for example you cannot determine the correlation between variables through qualitative designs because you need statistical analysis in order to correlate now some research designs are more suited to certain types of research questions but more about this in the next tutorial for empirical studies one could either collect new data it's called primary data or use existing data that is called secondary data or a combination of both

9:14 primary data is collected when you design an instrument go out collect brand new data yourself analyze it and interpret it secondary data is when you rely on existing research data that is reported elsewhere and then you interpret that for your own purposes think of maybe like census data it is collected throughout the whole country it is written up it is available online and you can use census data and interpret census data for your own study but that is secondary data because you didn't collect it yourself for non-empirical studies one can also use different sources of data for instance if you're doing a non-empirical research about a new measuring instrument you

10:00 could use primary data collected through a pilot study to inform your non-empirical work but you can also use existing data from the research of other people to inform your study or you can combine both data can come in many forms data can be numbers statistics scores measurements but data can also be textual visual pieces of text themes parts of words meanings order of words chunks of words stories symbols and all social artifacts different methods yield different types of data so when you design your study you need to ensure that the design will enable you to collect the data you need for example

10:46 if you need to understand people's perceptions of something you will need a methodology that allows you to collect perceptions you cannot get perceptions by for instance just observing people you need to ask them to get to their perceptions if you need to describe behavior it is not sufficient to ask people about it it would be a lot better to observe them by yourself and see their behavior for yourself for yourself or for instance ask their managers about their behavior rather than asking the person themselves about their behavior if you need to understand how marketing for example is approached by an organization this cannot be done by only doing a content analysis of the

11:32 marketing material can you see that the nature of the data you can collect by using a certain research strategy is an important consideration during the design process now whether your data is primary or secondary what the sources of data will be and what kind of data you need that should all be part of your planning process research designs can also be classified in terms of the degree of control the researcher has over the research setting for instance in a laboratory experiment the researcher has a lot of control over the environment but field research that happens out there in the natural environment of people has a low degree of control

12:18 researchers also have no control over what is documented in historical records and other texts or what they will get told during more unstructured forms of data collection we normally associate research in controlled environments with positivism and quantitative approaches where we want to predict and measure accurately or when we want to manipulate certain variables to look at the effects or relationships on other variables for instance in experimental studies but we can also control the research environment by choosing to focus on a single system like doing a case study about a single organization where a lot of the variables are controlled in the seams that they are the same for all the participants

13:06 in certain research settings a researcher has control over some of the variables but not all when you use research methods like a survey you have some control because you decide on the questions that are being asked but you cannot control all the potential variables that play into the study certain designs such as designs that are made for participatory action research or decal studies that honor relationships between people the researcher will intentionally hand control to participants in academic research theory serves different purposes in different types of designs in some studies usually those designs that are more quantitative we start with existing theory and deductively get to

13:54 our core concepts or hypotheses so that we can test those concepts and hypotheses verify the theory challenge or prove wrong the theory whatever it is through our data collection and an empirical process in some qualitative type studies theory is used more as a lens or as a background and is not necessarily tested but theory forms part of the bigger mission to get an in-depth rich understanding about a phenomenon and in other qualitative studies we do not start with theory at all but we start with our data we make sense of our data we find meaning and patterns in it so we are more prone then to actually develop theory from the ground up or

14:40 contribute to theory from the ground up than to work from existing theory when you are working on your research design or deciding on a specific research design to use for your study think about how theory comes into it that should also be part of your thinking from the beginning lastly i would like to mention another dimension and this is the time dimension when planning your research you also have to consider the placement of the study in terms of time is it current or historical for example also how long will the span of the study be is it cross-sectional so it's done in a single point in time or a short space of time or is the research longitudinal done over a longer period

15:27 and how time consuming is the research process the data collection and analysis process for example okay so this is a lot i know but the idea of this tutorial is to expand your mind to consider all the little details and decisions that you need to think about when you are busy with in the process of designing your research we will of course expand more on the practical side of things in the tutorial series on specific methods and in the next tutorial i will talk about some of the well-known research designs those blueprint ones with labels and names and and certain ways of doing things we cover those that

16:12 we often see in organizational communication research and that i believe you might want to use in your own research projects so until we talk again goodbye from me