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Goals of the Research Project

19 October, 2015 - 17:33

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. Understand and describe the differences among exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory research.
  2. Define and provide an example of idiographic research.
  3. Define and provide an example of nomothetic research.
  4. Identify circumstances under which research would be defined as applied and compare those to circumstances under which research would be defined as basic.

A recent news story about college students’ addictions to electronic gadgets (Lisk, 2011) 1 describes findings from some current research by Professor Susan Moeller and colleagues from the University of Maryland (http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com). The story raises a number of interesting questions. Just what sorts of gadgets are students addicted to? How do these addictions work? Why do they exist, and who is most likely to experience them?

Sociological research is great for answering just these sorts of questions. But in order to answer our questions well, we must take care in designing our research projects. In this chapter, we’ll consider what aspects of a research project should be considered at the beginning, including specifying the goals of the research, the components that are common across most research projects, and a few other considerations.

One of the first things to think about when designing a research project is what you hope to accomplish, in very general terms, by conducting the research. What do you hope to be able to say about your topic? Do you hope to gain a deep understanding of whatever phenomenon it is that you’re studying, or would you rather have a broad, but perhaps less deep, understanding? Do you want your research to be used by policymakers or others to shape social life, or is this project more about exploring your curiosities? Your answers to each of these questions will shape your research design.