Designing the Research

Once you've decided what the question is, you need to plan how you're going to answer it. In order to make such plans, you need to review the literature some more and then do some hard thinking. You may also need to go back and refine your question in light of your plans to answer it.

Reviewing the Literature: You need to explore the literature for useful approaches to your subject. Whereas, before you were looking for other works on your subject, here you are also considering works on other subjects that might provide insights or models for research into your subject. These works might provide a useful conceptual, theoretical, or methodological framework for your research.

Hard Thinking:

            Operationalizing Concepts- At this point you need to define your key concepts and determine how you're going to measure them. If you're doing research on ethnic conflicts, you need to be able to define an ethnic conflict and to specify how you would distinguish between ethnic conflicts and non-ethnic conflicts on reality.

            Determining Approach- Once you know what you are talking about, you have to determine how you are going learn more about it. Are you going to do case study, policy, cross sectional,   or time series analysis? Or are you going to do something else? Whatever you do, it is vital that your approach will produce a single answer from a set of more than one possible answers.

            Determining Data Needs: It is very important that you determine exactly what kind of data your approach ideally requires. That is to say, your approach should determine the data you gather rather than the reverse. Of course, you may need to refine your approach to simplify your data requirements.

Availability of Data: Once you have determined what data you need, you need to determine whether or not it is available. Your best strategy for making this determination is to enlist the aid of a research librarian.