Research Strategy/Research Design.

A research methodology is a basic orientation, it is usually framed as a very general process of enquiry. In order to carry out any specific research your methodology has to be operationalised in the practical situation in which you find yourself, with specific phenomena which you are trying to research (a particular technology, organisation, social effect, etc). So, in addition to a research methodology you have to come up with a research design or research strategy which deals with these specific details.

The design of your research can be thought of as bringing together both your research question (with its associated hypothesis), and your research methodology. The methodology gives you the overall shape of your research, but you need to focus on how to generate the specific evidence you require to answer your question. So, you put your methodology into practical action in such a way as to generate the specific evidence you need.

You are required to plan such matters as access to research subjects and resources (people, organisations, laboratory equipment, etc.), the volume of work that must be done to produce valid or generalisable results, timings, how results will be processed and presented, etc. When you have such a research strategy, then it should be a simple matter to carry it through (minus the inevitable mishaps). The exact form of this planning is going to depend very heavily on the kind of research that you are carrying out. Clearly, someone carrying out an analysis of an information systems problem in an organisation is going to require very different processes and resources from someone implementing and testing an idea for improving some algorithm. However, both of these research activities require the researcher to be focused on getting the results they need to answer their question.

Research students working in well-established institutions (especially in the sciences) often have the experience of sitting on a conveyor belt - since most aspects of their research design will have probably been planned and budgeted for before they even begin (this is especially true in sciences that require very costly equipment, such as astronomy or atomic physics). Such students are expected (merely!) to carry out an existing strategy competently, and process results. We are actually asking a great deal of you in requiring you to select your own methodology and research design.

The problem of research strategy is best tackled with the aid of standard techniques for project planning - since these deal explicitly with the availability of resources, sequencing and timing. Use a standard package such as Microsoft Project. This doesn't mean that research design and project planning are one and the same thing - far from it - but simply that well-designed research has, as one component, a clear timetable of activities. Since project management techniques exist that help you plan and specify such a timetable, you should use them 'off the shelf'.

When you write up your strategy, give a brief discussion of how you worked out how to apply your methodology practically, and include a PERT/CPA diagram, or equivalent. You should make a clear statement of how you expect your research design to enable you to answer your question.

Don't carry out your research design until you are completely clear on your question and methodology. This probably means doing a fair amount of specialist reading. If necessary, delay completing this section until you are well into your literature survey, and hence have a good idea of how work is conducted in your chosen field. If you have been luck enough to find a paper on which you can model your own work precisely, then you should be able to complete this section quite easily since you can just follow someone else's process.