Stephen Gorard - Research Design: Creating Robust Approaches for the Social Sciences

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Creating Robust Approaches for the Social Sciences

This new book is based on my own experiences of all the approaches described herein. It is for those who want to design their own research, or make critical judgements about the designs of others. It is suitable for new researchers, easy to read, simple in style, with little terminology, and intended for a wide audience. The book includes the elements of research designs, a description of the common existing designs, and even advice on sampling, analysis, ethics, and writing your first research proposal. It contains a large number of craft tips. Yet, it is not simply a cookbook or a set of off-the-shelf designs, and does not offer push-button solutions. Rather, it is about strategies for research, the logic of research, and how to make convincing research-based claims. It empowers readers to make judgements by focusing on why the elements of design matter, and how they can be used to generate an almost infinite variety of study designs. This book is also highly innovative, introducing new ideas for research design. Some readers will find some content contentious, but I have tried to provide a reasoned argument for all steps throughout. Even so, writing a book of this ambition is a tough task. I would urge readers to think carefully about the material in the book, and to pursue the examples and references cited within it.

Writing a book about research design for social scientists is a special challenge, because social science is so varied, ranging from approaches like cultural studies, through applied fields like business studies, to disciplines like psychology. Design is the Cinderella of methods training. A typical training course for social scientists might move from epistemological considerations to methods of data collection and analysis, without any consideration of study design. There are plenty of books about instrument or sample design, and even more about methodology. Design tends to be confused with paradigm, data collection, or analysis. As a consequence, many researchers do not consider design as a separate issue when planning their own research. Many may not even know what design is, or feel that it is something reserved for those conducting factorial experiments or analysing cohort studies. Writing about research design is also a challenge because there is quite strong resistance to it. When people say that something is a Cinderella, they usually mean that it is ignored or forgotten. But in the fairy story, if you recall, Cinderella is deliberately repressed by her ugly sisters. That is what I mean also about design. There is some unaccountable hostility to it, perhaps by those who have the most to lose if research improves. As this book illustrates, design leads to better social science research, just like any form of serious planning ahead would.