Research Methods: Developing your research design

This MESHGuide is designed to provide teachers with practical strategies to develop interesting and relevant research questions and to formulate a research design to engage in research-informed practice in their school or setting.

This MESHGuide draws on a range of key literature in the field of social science research, and it has been informed by lessons learned from the author's research. The guide aims to help teachers to:

• understand the purpose of a research design
• understand the significance of formulating a research question
• develop the initial focus of your research by exploring different potential starting points for this
• understand different ways of categorising research questions
• identify the characteristics of good research questions and apply these in practice
• develop and evaluate your own research questions
• operationalize your research aim so that you can develop appropriate research tools to answer your research questions by developing question-method connections in your own research
• improve your research data through understanding the nature of validity and reliability and exploration factors that could impact on these