• Design is a word which means a plan or something that is

conceptualized by the mind. As a result of a mental activity

characterized by unfixed formation of something but an
extensive interconnection of things, a design in the field of
research serves as a blueprint or a skeletal framework of your
research study. It includes many related aspects of your
research work. A choice of a research design requires you to
finalize your mind on the purpose, philosophical basis, and
types of data of your research, including your method of
collecting, analyzing , interpreting, and presenting the data. It is
a plan that directs your mind to several stages of your research
work.
• CASE STUDY
• ETHNOGRAPHY
• HISTORICAL STUDY
• PHENOMENOLOGY
• GROUNDED THEORY
• To do a research study based on this research design
is to describe a person, a thing, or any creature on
Earth for the purpose of explaining the reasons
behind the nature of its existence. Your aim here is to
determine why such creature(person, organizing, thing,
or event) acts, behaves, occurs, or exists in a
particular manner. Usually, a case study centers on an
individual or single subject matter. Your methods of
collecting data for this qualitative research design are
interview, observation, and questionnaire.
• A qualitative research design called ethnography
involves a study of a certain cultural group or
organization in which, the researcher, to obtain
knowledge about characteristics, organizational set-
up, and relationships of the group members, must
necessarily involve you in their group activities. Since
this design gives stress to the study of a group of
people, in a way, this is one special kind of a case
study. The only thing that makes it different from the
latter is your participation as a researcher in the
activities of the group.
• This qualitative research design tells you the right research
method to determine the reasons for changes or permanence of
things in the physical world in a certain period. What is
referred to in the study as time of changes is not a time shorter
than a year but a period indicating a big number of years.
Obviously, historical study differs from other research designs
because of this one element that is peculiar to it, the scope. The
scope or coverage of a historical study refers to the number of
years covered, the kind of events focused on, and the extent of
new knowledge or discoveries resulting from the historical study.
A clue about the scope is usually reflected by the title of the
study such as the following examples:
• A Five-Year Study of the Impact of the K-12 Curriculum on the
Philippine Employment System
• The Rise and Fall of the Twenty-Year Reign of Former Philippine
President, Ferdinand E. Marcos
• Filipino- Student Activism from the Spanish Era to the
Contemporary Period
• A phenomenon is something you experience on Earth as a
person. It is a sensory experience that makes you perceive or
understand things that naturally occur in your life such as death,
joy, friendship, caregiving, defeat, victory, and the like. This
qualitative research design makes you follow a research
method that will let you understand the ways of how people go
through inevitable events in their lives. You are prone to
extending your time in listening to people’s recount of their
significant experiences to be able to get a clue or pattern of
their techniques in coming to terms with the positive or negative
results of their life experiences.
• A research study adhering to a grounded theory research
design aims at developing a theory to increase our
understanding of something in a psycho-social context. Such
study enables you to develop theories to explain sociologically
and psychologically influenced phenomena or proper
identification of a certain educational process. Occurring in an
inductive manner, a research study following a grounded theory
design takes place in an inductive manner, wherein one basic
category of peoples action and interactions gets related to a
second category; to third category; and so on, until a new
theory emerges from the previous data.