Methodologies and Methods Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Methodologies and Methods - Essay Example Research design defined generally is the form or framework the experimenter uses to get the results of the study. There are many different kinds of research designs, both qualitative and quantitative, and flexible designs represent qualitative for the most part, whereas fixed designs represent quantitative type studies. There are also mixed designs. Quantitative research designs such as the one proposed for the current research serve the purpose of showing causal motivations, observing present conditions and longitudinal comparisons, and establishing relationships with evidence from a sample size that is generally large or, in some cases, deferred to a larger statistical research body (Robson, 2002). Qualitative The key theories behind qualitative research involve the development of research questions, rather than the formulation of absolutes through testable hypotheses. The research instrument is definitely qualitative in nature if it represents a standardized measurement test that is predetermined before the research has even taken place, through measurements taken in other studies using the same survey instrument. This is not the type of measurement tool that is necessarily malleable to researcher interaction with the survey group or the addition of new research questions as they come up, which also makes it a less strong methodology in terms of qualitative features. The qualitative approach is perhaps less appropriate for this research because the author is assumedly examining a survey group of more than twenty individuals, and needs a standardized sort of quantitative test to keep data collection simple. In the case of the research experiment, the qualitative study will seek to find common themes and areas of possibility for further study. The descriptive phase follows, in which the demographic and statistical information on the target population and target program emulations are determined in respective forms of their completeness and efficiency as repres entative statistics and program models. Quantitative Quantitative methods are suitable for studies into social issues, despite their scientific background and trappings, because they provide demonstrable measurements which can be attributed to larger populations. Even with a relatively small sample size, quantitative research can present results and findings in a way that is verifiable, reliable, and has a degree of repeatability. In other words, a small survey can be reused with a larger population. Overall there are many different facets of methodology that can be applied to an experimental design. This is a generalization that can be made about these different types of designs, which have their respective advantages and disadvantages. Surveys and experiments are examples of fixed research designs, which are more quantitative than qualitative and have more aspects of this type of theory. Quantitative studies such as the one outlined in the current report’s proposed methodol ogy tend to rely on hard data and statistics that can provide generalizable results about a population, whereas qualitative studies could be more of a case example or subjective viewpoint. As the extant literature states about the difference between fixed and flexible designs, â€Å"Flexible research designs are much more difficult to pin down than fixed designs. This is in part because it is only in recent