- Research is an extremely cyclic process.
- Later stages might necessitate a review of earlier work.
- This isn't a weakness of the process but is part of the built-in error correction machinery.
- Because of the cyclic nature of research, it can be difficult to determine where to start and when to stop.
Step 1: A question is raised
- A question occurs to or is posed to the researcher for which that researcher has no answer.
- This doesn't mean that someone else doesn't already have an answer.
- The question needs to be converted to an appropriate problem statement like that documented in a research proposal.
Step 2: Suggest hypotheses
- The researcher generates intermediate hypotheses to describe a solution to the problem.
- This is at best a temporary solution since there is as yet no evidence to support either the acceptance or rejection of these hypotheses.
Step 3: Literature Review
- The available literature is reviewed to determine if there is already a solution to the problem.
- Existing solutions do not always explain new observations.
- The existing solution might require some revision or even be discarded.
Step 4: Literature evaluation
- It’s possible that the literature review has yielded a solution to the proposed problem.
- This means that you haven’t really done research.
- On the other hand, if the literature review turns up nothing, then additional research activities are justified.
Step 5: Acquire Data
- The researcher now begins to gather data relating to the research problem.
- The means of data acquisition will often change based on the type of the research problem.
- This might entail only data gathering, but it could also require the creation of new measurement instruments.
Step 6: Data analysis
- The data that were gathered in the previous step are analyzed as a first step in ascertaining their meaning.
- As before, the analysis of the data does not constitute research.
- This is basic number crunching.
Step 7: Data interpretation
- The researcher interprets the newly analyzed data and suggests a conclusion.
- This can be difficult.
- Keep in mind that data analysis that suggests a correlation between two variables can’t automatically be interpreted as suggesting causality between those variables.
Step 8: Hypothesis Support
- The data will either support the hypotheses or they won’t.
- This may lead the researcher to cycle back to an earlier step in the process and begin again with a new hypothesis.
- This is one of the self self-correcting mechanisms associated with the scientific method.
