3.4: Components of a Research Project

Learning Objectives

• Describe useful strategies to employ when searching for literature.
• Describe why sociologists review prior literature and how they organize their literature reviews.
• Identify the main sections contained in scholarly journal articles.
• Identify and describe the major components researchers need to plan for when designing a research project.
• Describe the importance of a research proposal. 

In this section, we examine the typical components of a research proposal and project. Our purpose here is to provide a general overview of research design; the specifics of these components will vary depending on your particular project.

Searching for Literature

Familiarizing yourself with research that has already been conducted is crucial for coming up with a good research design. As you search for literature, you may have to be fairly broad in your search.

Consider a student researcher who wants to understand why some college students stage protest "smoke-outs" when a campus implements a tobacco-free policy. If she searches in a database for “college student activist smoke-outs,” she might yield no results. Concluding there is no prior research, she might assume she cannot write a literature review. However, if she broadens her search to “college student activism” or “deviance and social protest,” she will find a wealth of articles. Reading these broader studies helps her understand what motivates students to become involved in activist efforts. By searching broadly, she identifies the foundation upon which her own work can be built.

Once she has identified a set of articles by searching broadly, her reading of those articles should be narrower. Keeping her specific focus on campus protest in mind, she can think about how the theories from broader studies on activism apply to her specific focus.

Reviewing the Literature

Developing an annotated bibliography is often one of the early steps researchers take. A second step involves a literature review, in which a researcher positions their work within the context of prior scholarly work. A literature review addresses the following: What questions have other scholars asked? What do we know? What questions remain?

The best literature reviews do not just list articles; they synthesize findings, organizing them around themes relevant to the researcher’s focus. For example, a student researching speciesism (the belief that some species are superior to others) might organize their review around two themes: the "why" and the "how." In the "why" section, they describe prior research on why humans construct divisions between themselves and animals; in the "how" section, they arrange subsections around previous theories of social categorization. This organizational scheme helps readers understand the existing theories and highlights what we still don't know, setting the stage for the student's own research.

To read scholarly literature successfully, first focus on the abstract, which summarizes the research question, methods, and key findings. After the abstract, journal articles typically contain an introduction, literature review, methodology, findings, and discussion. When digesting an article, a strategic approach is to read the abstract, then jump to the discussion section. The discussion helps you understand the author’s major findings and how those findings relate to other research. As you read, apply what you have learned about research design: Is the study exploratory or explanatory? What is the unit of analysis? Using these concepts helps you critically evaluate the literature in your area of inquiry.

Additional Important Components

Identifying your research question and reviewing existing literature are only the beginning. You must also consider the following major components as you design your project:

• Research question: A clear, focused query that guides your study.

• Research strategy: Deciding if your approach is exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory; idiographic or nomothetic; and inductive or deductive.

• Research goals: Determining if your research is basic (contributing to knowledge) or applied (solving a specific problem).

• Units of analysis and units of observation: Identifying who or what you are studying and how you observe it.

• Key concepts: Engaging in conceptualization and operationalization to define what you are studying.

• Method of data collection: Choosing between surveys, interviews, ethnography, etc.

• Research participants: Defining your population and sampling strategy.

• Ethical concerns: Identifying potential risks to participants during data collection, analysis, or sharing.

Decisions about these components do not always occur in a neat, sequential order. You may need to think about ethical concerns even before zeroing in on a final research question.

Research Proposal

Before starting, it is often a good idea to write a research proposal detailing these decisions and the rationale behind each one. A proposal addresses what research questions you will study and why, what prior literature exists, what theories you will employ, how you will measure your concepts, what research method you will use, and your sampling strategy.

If you are seeking funding, agencies require such a proposal to select the best studies. Even if funding is not sought, a proposal serves as a vehicle for seeking feedback from other researchers, allowing you to identify potential problems—such as missing constructs—before you begin collecting data. This feedback is invaluable, as it is often too late to correct critical flaws once data collection has begun.

Key Takeaways

• Literature Search: Start broad and narrow your reading to specific, relevant peer-reviewed studies.

• Literature Review: A synthesis of prior research organized by themes rather than just a list of authors.

• Research Components: A project must define its question, strategy, goals, units of analysis, concepts, collection method, population, and ethics.

• Research Proposal: A foundational document justifying the design and identifying potential pitfalls before data collection.

Exercises

1. Find and read: Check out a complete journal article that addresses a topic of interest to you. In four to eight sentences, summarize the author’s research question, theoretical framing, methods used, and major findings. What reading strategies helped you recall the most relevant details?
2. Use the example: Using the example of the campus smoking ban mentioned in this section, design a hypothetical research project by identifying a plan for each of the nine components of research design presented here.