Research Methodology

Starting point
• Your research topic is the starting point, not your methodology
• You cant answer the HOW until the WHAT is answered
 The Literature Review
• What have other people done? What is their thinking about the problem?
• What already exists?
• Why are you researching? Gap
• What are the theories? Paradigms? Bigger picture ideas?
 The Introduction
• What will you research
• E.g. use of psychosocial features to identify hate speech in codeswitched
text messages
 Research Methodology
• This is the “How” of your research : how are you going to do it and why that particular way?
• What data you will collect?
• i.e. the unit of information that will help inform your question
• What will you measure?
• What will you ask (questionnaire), answers to the questions?
• Who or where you will get the data from?
• How you will collect the data? Survey, interviews, crawl
• How you will analyze the data (what did you do about the data to make sense of it and to help you
answer the research question)
 A good Methodology
• It should enable another researcher to mimic your study
• It needs to be well justified why did you choose this?
• Explaining why the steps were crucial in doing this?
• It is more than just an account of what you did and how you did it. You need to
explain why you made those choices!
• Convenience, costs, and resource limitations are common justifications
• It demonstrates your research skills
• Your methodology has to align with your research questions and objectives
 Quantitative, Qualitative, & Mixed
• In quantitative, your data is anything number-based and measurable.
• In qualitative, the data includes words, ideas, phrases, and concepts
• Mixed Method: have a combination of quantitative and qualitative data
 Research Philosophy
• The type of data you work with reflects your research philosophy
• Positivist
• Theory or hypothesis gets tested using the data
• It tends to lead towards quantitative data
• Interpretivist
• Use the data to develop a theory or hypothesis
• Often involves a qualitative data
• Your research philosophy will depend on your research questions
• The two can be mixed and work together
 What is Sampling?
• Population: every possible person that is relevant to your research
• Sample: a small proportion of the population( a slice of the population)
• Representative: when the sample represents the population as a whole
• It is essential to understand the limitations of your sampling approach
Sampling
 Data collection methods
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Surveys
Quantitative methods
 Qualitative collection
• Interviews
• 1-on-1 back and forth discussion between the researcher and the participants
• Focus groups
• Participants interact with the researcher and each other. Can be influenced by others
• Document analysis
• Researcher analyses existing texts e.g. historical records
• It is very common for you to be a little unsure about the exact analysis
approach
• Every piece of the research needs to be able to answer the research question
and be justified, including the analysis.
• Your analysis methods need to directly connect to your research question(s)
• Are there a number of ways to approach your data?
• Ways of grouping the ideas, concepts and data into themes (qualitative)
 Qualitative data analysis
• The starting point for any qualitative analysis is reading, listening, and
digesting
• Do this over and over and be sure of what is happening and how that fits into
your research question
• Approaches to analysis
• Content analysis : theming or categorization
• Discourse analysis: understanding how people interact with each other
• Narrative analysis
 Quantitative Analysis
• Is what you are doing describing your data or comparing your data
• Use descriptive statistics to sense check your sample’s representativeness
• Thee must be strong alignment
between the 5 components
• Exploratory research will often use a qualitative methodology
• Think about the practical limitations you will face when collecting your data
• Confirmatory research will often use a quantitative methodology (positivist)
• Have the instruments to do the measurements
• Or a survey
• Theory testing, theory proving
• Practicality
Research Types
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEqYnV6KWfY
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY9j_t570LY