A Practical Guide to Choosing Your Research Design

Your research design should follow directly from your research question, not the other way around. Start by asking whether you're trying to establish causation, describe a phenomenon, or explore lived experience — each points to a different design family. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs suit causal questions where you can manipulate a variable. Correlational and survey designs suit questions about relationships between variables you can't ethically or practically manipulate. Qualitative designs — case study, phenomenology, grounded theory — suit questions about meaning, process, or context. Mixed-methods designs are useful when a single method can't capture both the scale and the depth of your question. Whatever you choose, state your design explicitly in your methods section and justify why it fits your question. Reviewers flag mismatches between stated research questions and the design used to answer them more often than almost any other methodological issue.