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Design Types and Sub-Types: Grouping
Design Types and Sub-Types: Grouping
Design Types and Sub-Types: Grouping
measures of the variables specified in the problem research. The design of a study defines the study
type (descriptive, correlation, semi-experimental, experimental, review, meta-analytic) and sub-type
(e.g., descriptive-longitudinal case study), research problem, hypotheses, independent and
dependent variables, experimental design, and, if applicable, data collection methods and a
statistical analysis plan. A research design is a framework that has been created to find answers to
research questions.
Contents
Grouping[edit]
The choice of how to group participants depends on the research hypothesis and on how the
participants are sampled. In a typical experimental study, there will be at least one "experimental"
condition (e.g., "treatment") and one "control" condition ("no treatment"), but the appropriate method
of grouping may depend on factors such as the duration of measurement phase and participant
characteristics:
Cohort study
Cross-sectional study
Cross-sequential study
Longitudinal study
Confirmatory versus exploratory research[edit]
Confirmatory research tests a priori hypotheses — outcome predictions that are made before the
measurement phase begins. Such a priori hypotheses are usually derived from a theory or the
results of previous studies. The advantage of confirmatory research is that the result is more
meaningful, in the sense that it is much harder to claim that a certain result is generalizable beyond
the data set. The reason for this is that in confirmatory research, one ideally strives to reduce the
probability of falsely reporting a coincidental result as meaningful. This probability is known as α-
level or the probability of a type I error.
Exploratory research, on the other hand, seeks to generate a posteriori hypotheses by examining a
data-set and looking for potential relations between variables. It is also possible to have an idea
about a relation between variables but to lack knowledge of the direction and strength of the relation.
If the researcher does not have any specific hypotheses beforehand, the study is exploratory with
respect to the variables in question (although it might be confirmatory for others). The advantage of
exploratory research is that it is easier to make new discoveries due to the less stringent
methodological restrictions. Here, the researcher does not want to miss a potentially interesting
relation and therefore aims to minimize the probability of rejecting a real effect or relation; this
probability is sometimes referred to as β and the associated error is of type II. In other words, if the
researcher simply wants to see whether some measured variables could be related, he would want
to increase the chances of finding a significant result by lowering the threshold of what is deemed to
be significant.
Sometimes, a researcher may conduct exploratory research but report it as if it had been
confirmatory ('Hypothesizing After the Results are Known', HARKing[4]—see Hypotheses suggested
by the data); this is a questionable research practice bordering on fraud.