Meera Khemani

2039237

Behavioural Research 2

Asynchronous Activity

Q: How you differentiate between Research types and Research Design in Social sciences
research?

Answer:
Research types are the properties of a research that define the purpose of the research, whereas the
research designs are the techniques used by a researcher to fit the hypothesis and predicted
outcome. The design of the research then correlates to the type of research.

The main types of research design, if they were to be put in an umbrella category, are data
collection, measurement, and analysis.

The way to differentiate between them is how one leads to the other. When deciding the topic of
the research, the research design must be coherent with the topic. For example, when trying to
research how many people living near you believe in a certain social prejudice, one might conduct a
survey, but if one wants to see how many people will act on that prejudice, they might conduct an
experiment. The survey research deigns falls under the Quantitative research type, where a
hypothesis is to be proved. While the experiment falls under the empirical research type.

Examples of types of research include: Qualitative, Quantitative, Empirical etc. Examples of Research
Designs include: Experimental, Survey, Descriptive, etc.