Research Methods
Research Question to Method Mapper
Four fictional research questions, read one at a time. What is each one actually asking for, and what would you have to know before naming an analysis?
Simulated — fictional studies, no real project or dataset
Learning objective
By the end you should be able to read a research question and say what kind of claim it makes, and which designs could support it.
About 20 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.
There is often more than one answer
Several of these questions can be read in more than one defensible way, and one of them is deliberately ambiguous. The tool marks readings as well supported, defensible or hard to defend from this wording rather than right and wrong, and explains what each reading would commit you to.
- Answer the opening question to unlock the mapper.
- Read the question in the pinned card, then set the four controls.
- Check your reading. The feedback addresses each part separately.
- Move to the next question. Four in all, then a challenge.
First, a judgement
Students are routinely taught a flowchart: look at the data, count the groups, pick the test. Before you use the mapper, commit to a view about where a method choice really comes from.
The mapper
One question at a time. Your reading builds up in the pinned card as you set each control, so you can always see the question you are reading and the reading you are giving it.
Key terms
- Aim
- What the question asks to be produced: a description, an association, a causal claim, or an account of meaning.
- Design
- The structure of the study — who is compared with whom, measured when, and by whose allocation.
- Underspecified
- A question that has not yet fixed enough for a design to follow from it. Saying so is one of the available answers here.
- Mixed methods
- Combining approaches so that each answers a distinct part of the question.
Reading a research question
Four decisions per question. None of them is "which test?" — that comes last, and only once the first four are settled.
Question 1 of 4
Part by part
Challenge — the same data, two claims
A researcher has interview transcripts from 18 students about group work, and a spreadsheet of those students' attendance, prior marks and self-reported engagement. They want to publish one paper.
What this demonstrates
The design a question needs follows from what the question is asking for — a description, a difference, an association, a meaning — and not from whether the data will be numbers or words. Reading the aim first is what makes the rest of the chain fall out, and noticing that a question is underspecified is a finding rather than a failure.
For teaching elsewhere: take this activity as one self-contained block of HTML, on the clipboard or as a file. Either way it is styled so that it will not disturb the page you put it into.