Knowing the research opportunities, you should have thought quite seriously about your research methodology. This will help you to decide upon the most appropriate methods for your research.

For example, if you’re leaning towards quantitative research, survey work in the form of a questionnaire or structured interviews may be appropriate. If you’re interested in action research, it might be useful to find out more about semi-structured interviewing or focus groups. In quantitative research you can define your research methods early in the planning stage. You know what you want to find out and you can decide upon the best way to obtain the information. Also, you will be able to decide early on how many people you need to contact. However, in some types of qualitative research it may be difficult to define your methods specifically. You may decide that semi-structured interviews would be useful, although you’re not sure, in the planning stages, how many you will need to conduct. You may find also that you need to use other methods as the research progresses. Maybe you want to run a focus group to see what people think about the hypotheses you have generated from the interviews. Or perhaps you need to spend some time in the field observing something which has arisen during the interview stage.

Defining needs and means

It is not necessary to use only one research method, although many projects do this. A combination of methods can be desirable as it enables you to overcome the different weaknesses inherent in all methods. What you must be aware of, however, when deciding upon your methods, are the constraints under which you will have to work. What is your time scale? What is your budget? Are you the only researcher, or will you have others to help you? There’s no point deciding that a large scale, national postal survey is the best way to do your research if you only have a budget of £50 and two months in which to complete your work.

Also, you need to think about the purpose of your research as this will help point to the most appropriate methods to use. For example, if you want to describe in detail the experiences of a group of women trying to set up and run a charity, you wouldn’t send them a closed ended questionnaire. Instead, you might ask to become involved and set up a piece of action research in which you can decide to use interviews and focus groups. Or you might decide to hold two semi-structured interviews with each of the women involved, one at the beginning of their project and one at the end.

If your goal is detailed description, you do not need to try to contact as many people as possible.