Well hello all, and welcome to the latest blog post. This month I thought I would do something about the practical side of research, and something I would have found useful at the start of my PhD around the logistics of research, and that is how to design a study. Quick disclaimer that this is based on my experience and feedback from my supervisors I received when designing and running my own studies and is more of an ideal approach I would recommend based on the mistakes I made when doing it. It will also be focusing on qualitative participant-based studies as that is what I have experience with. So, hope you find it interesting and maybe even useful if you are thinking about running a study yourself at some point.

So to get started, lets break down what a study is for the purpose of this post and what I am talking about. A study is an activity of some kind which has been designed by a researcher to answer some specific questions they have. They can take many forms from a simple survey that takes five minutes, to having participants attend a class to learn a topic over the course of multiple weeks. The variety of forms a study can take is one of the reasons they can be quite hard to design, and especially hard to run sometimes. The studies I am talking about though have a major common factor, they involve people who take part in the studies. For these studies we can break it down into four primary stages: the idea stage, the design stage, the deployment stage and the writeup stage.

The first stage is the one I struggle with the most, and that is the ideas stage. This is where you have a vague idea of what you are looking for, maybe even some thoughts about how you might find it, but it’s all a bit up in the air. To help start to narrow that down, you start thinking about a few things.
First, what are your research questions. These are specific and answerable questions about what you are hoping to find, and might be informed by a wider project, or just the specific study you have in mind. The questions need to be open and not make assumptions and outline what the study should do and find, and you will usually have 2-3 questions for a study. Once you have your questions you start to think about what you need to answer them. This will be things such as who will be in your study, how many people, what type of study will it be and what kind of data will it give and how will that help answer the questions driving the study. Once you have all of this you are ready to move to the next stage.

The design stage is the bit I quite enjoy. This is where we take all the information we have put together and create the method for our study. We look at the literature around the type of study we have decided to run to understand the best ways to run it and how the study should be conducted. We figure out the best way to recruit and if there is any room to give participants something for their time such as a voucher. It is also the part where we complete one of the most important parts of a research study involving participants, ethics.
Completing ethics for a study is an incredibly important step and is one of the parts that must be considered very carefully. When you have participants in your study you are being trusted to conduct your study in an ethical and appropriate manner and look after the data of the people who have taken the time and energy to help you with your research. I cannot understate how important the ethics of a study is. The actual process of ethics involves making considerations for things like anonymity, compensating participants where appropriate, looking after the wellbeing of everyone in the study including the researchers. It also involves how the study will be advertised to ensure you are being honest and transparent and also ensure you are representing your institution positively for anything public facing. While ethics could be a blog post of its own, I will say the bit of ethics that matters most is consent from a participant. The way I approach this is via a consent form at the start of the study for the participant to agree to be involved and say they understand their rights and the study itself, and a debrief form at the end for them to agree that the study was as expected, and they are happy for their information and contribution to be included. Ethics can be tedious, but in research involving people and their data, there should always be time to make sure your research is being conducted well and in a way that is respectful of the people who you cannot do the research without.

Once we have designed our study and materials, considered our ethics, and got all the approvals we need, it’s time to deploy the study. At this stage you put up posters, send emails and whatever other methods of advertising you have decided in order to recruit people to your study. This is also the bit that can be the most demoralising, as recruiting participants, is a very difficult task, especially depending on who you are recruiting. Say for example if you are trying to recruit teachers, who are constantly busy due a to a full schedule and can be difficult to get hold of (I speak from experience), then you should prepare for a long and difficult time recruiting. But even people who seem easy, have lives and things going on that can make it hard for your advertising to reach them. But the main thing is keep advertising, keep trying and don’t give up.

Once you have recruited some participants, they may have some questions about the study, so always make sure they have chance to ask. The next step is conducting your study which is where this gets vague as like I said, there a lot of different ways to conduct a study. Whatever your study is though, it usually has a clear beginning and end in terms of when you are collecting data. You should also have a withdrawal period for if a participant decides they don’t want to be in the study and wish to withdraw their data. To manage this, you would normally tell a participant as part of getting consent how long they will have to withdraw so you know when you can start your analysis without worry of someone withdrawing and causing you to have to go back and change it.

Once you have finished you study and all the data is collected and processed, you start the final stage, which is writing up. In this stage you will go through your data to analyse it and understand how it answers the questions you made all the way back at the start. Analysis can take many forms depending on the type of data, such as looking for themes in transcripts, or statistically significant results in a survey response. Regardless, you will develop your interpretation of the data for writing up. When writing up, you might write it up into a paper to try and publish at a conference, or the data might feed into a bigger project to be part of other sets of data. Whatever way you are using it, you will usually write up what you have done, why you did it the way you did, and what your data was and what it meant. This phase is important as you need to make sure it is clear how you did the study to get the results and why they can be trusted by others.

Once you have written up your study, congratulations you are done! This whole process will usually take at least couple of months to get from designing to writing up and can be longer than even that depending on ethical approval and things like recruiting participants. But even though it can be an incredibly difficult task, having your own data and getting to work with it and publish can be extremely rewarding.

So in summary, designing and running a study, is an incredibly big task, but also incredibly important. Research can’t really go anywhere without data as otherwise we would just all be looking at other peoples work and discussing it. There are many elements to be considered and many important factors to keep in mind, but a study conducted well and ethically will be an incredibly useful source of information for any research. So I hope you found this post useful and look forward to writing the next one.