Skip to Main Content

The Process of Writing a Research Paper Guide: Types of Research Designs

This guide is intended to help students organize and write a quality research paper for classes. Also included are recommendations concerning how to successfully manage and complete specific course assignments.

General Structure and Writing Style

The function of a research design is to ensure that the evidence obtained enables you to effectively address the research problem logically and as unambiguously as possible. In social sciences research, obtaining information relevant to the research problem generally entails specifying the type of evidence needed to test a theory, to evaluate a program, or to accurately describe and assess meaning related to an observable phenomenon.

With this in mind, a common mistake made by researchers is that they begin their investigations far too early, before they have thought critically about what information is required to address the research problem. Without attending to these design issues beforehand, the overall research problem will not be adequately addressed and any conclusions drawn will run the risk of being weak and unconvincing. As a consequence, the overall validity of the study will be undermined.

The length and complexity of describing research designs in your paper can vary considerably, but any well-developed design will achieve the following:

  1. Identify the research problem clearly and justify its selection, particularly in relation to any valid alternative designs that could have been used,
  2. Review and synthesize previously published literature associated with the research problem,
  3. Clearly and explicitly specify hypotheses [i.e., research questions] central to the problem,
  4. Effectively describe the data which will be necessary for an adequate testing of the hypotheses and explain how such data will be obtained, and
  5. Describe the methods of analysis to be applied to the data in determining whether or not the hypotheses are true or false.

The research design is usually incorporated into the introduction and varies in length depending on the type of design you are using. However, you can get a sense of what to do by reviewing the literature of studies that have utilized the same research design. This can provide an outline to follow for your own paper.