Doing Research- The Basics

Academic research done for the purpose of publishing a paper or presenting it at a conference or for a doctoral thesis is not everyone's cup of tea, and should not be. But if it is, how should one go about it? I get asked this question often, and it's not so difficult to answer. Let me attempt to do so. Sorry if it sounds like gyan from a baba or a baby!

The most important part of any research is not the statistics, but well, ...RESEARCH. Or, in easier to understand jargon, the literature review. Of past work done in the subject area you want to work on. Many researchers start with questionnaire design, do a survey of sorts, and wonder what they did! The reason is, there's no link with theory, no justification for what you did or how (methodology, to use jargon).

A good literature review can be done at your desk with the help of an online journal database like EBSCO or ProQuest these days. It takes only a day to download your readings for a particular keyword or phrase (research topic), but many weeks to read and digest it. Once it floats around in the brain, questions arise, and some of these serve as research questions for your study. Others lead to a possible methodology, after discussions with peers or your research guide. Justification for your work is easier, and linking your findings after your research to existing findings provides a validation or otherwise of work done earlier- and yours.

Questionnaire design is critical if you want to do a survey, but that must follow the literature review. That must result in getting the results in a format you want. If you can visualise blank tables of results, can you get them from the questions you have got on the questionnaire, is a good way to think about it.

Lastly, the results must allude to the hypotheses or questions asked in the beginning, and say what happened to each one of these. All this applies to research with primary data. Conceptual papers can come out of literature review and some projections or hypotheses alone.