Research Methods: Developing your research design

Developing your research tools

It is beyond the scope of this MESHGuide to provide detailed guidance on the design of research tools and how to implement research methods. It does however provide a brief overview of key aspects you may find helpful to consider when designing research tools most commonly utilised in researching educational contexts, together with resources to enable you to select appropriate research methods. To gain more in-depth understanding it would be beneficial to read more about these and the links below can be used as a starting point. An important point to consider is that research methods can be combined in different ways in your research study. For example you may begin by administering a questionnaire to gain a broad picture of the factors that may be of significance in the context you want to study, subsequently you may follow up with interviews to gain more detailed insights into the significance of these factors to the individuals involved and how the factors are inter-related.

Themes explored in this section are adapted from Newby (2014) and Cohen et al. (2011).