Practical Research (from idea to outline)

Hello and welcome to Practical Research: First steps, I'm Dr. Matthews. If you're like most people starting a research project for the first time, whether for a college or university course, an assignment by your employer or other funding agency, then you may have already spent a lot of time looking for courses that show you how to conduct research. The purpose of this course is to get you started on your research before you start on your research. Here’s what I mean.

Invariably, you've come across a lot of really good information about different research methods, quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, or data collection and analysis processes. You may have even found a number of programs and applications to help you conduct, complete, or better understand your research or the research process. But you may still be unsure of precisely where to start or how it all fits together. That's where this course comes in.

You see almost every research project begins with the same first steps, found in the research proposal. Many courses start with something like, "after you've submitted you research proposal" or "once your proposal has been approved..." Yet the steps they skip are some of the most important to the whole process. It's these steps that inform and guide your research toward success.

The Council of Graduate Schools confirmed this a few years back with its Ph.D. Completion Project, which tracked 9,000 doctoral students among 30 institutions from the early ’90s through 2004, and again with 25 institutions 2004-2007, and 22 from 2007-2010. They found consistently that there were 6 key factors  which influenced whether a student completed their program or not, and among them was Research Mode of the Field. Numerous other studies and reviews support the challenges associated with the research as one of the key factors leading to attrition rates for students.

So whether you're a brand new researcher or a seasoned professional, you'll find these steps very useful in getting you started in the right direction and even more importantly, keeping you aligned with your research goals.

You are probably already aware of the first three elements of your research proposal;

Chapter 1 Introduction, where you explore the history and significance of your research and the potential impact on your field.

Chapter 2 Literature Review where you examine previous work that’s been conducted relevant to your research, and can contribute to your hypothesis.

Chapter 3 Methodology which outlines the step by step process or procedure you intend to follow in order to identify your target population, recruit participants into your research, develop or apply instruments, as well as collect analyze data.

Now this course was designed to support three chapters of your research proposal by the end of this course you'll have a research topic that you can complete in a reasonable time.

This will help offset the attrition rate for people who don't complete their research at all. You'll also have a research title that's compelling and other people will want to read. You'll have a problem statement related to your research topic that's clear and easy to understand and you'll have a purpose statement that demonstrates how your research will contribute to the body of knowledge.

Avoid unnecessary stress and frustration by disciplining yourself to save your work frequently and effectively (and did I mention frequently)! After years of writing and rewriting research papers, proposals, books, and other publications, I realized that my number one stressor was losing my work due to a computer glitch or a software malfunction, or any number of other avoidable issues. First, and foremost - don't rely solely on physical storage devices. They may be good as a backup, but they are mass produced and are just as prone to defective manufacturing as they are to electromagnetic erasure, physical damage, mislabeling, accidental overwriting, loss, or theft.

Secondly, I realize that Microsoft Word has a feature in the setup that allows you to save your work automatically to a specific location, but it only works if a) we remember to set it up when we first activate the application, and/or b) we remember how to get to the location where our work is saved!

For all these reasons and more, I want to share four of my favorite tools, aside from the auto save feature in Microsoft to help you avoid the number one stress or frustration many research authors encounter. Two are storage / retrieval and two are automated saves. The all have pros and cons so examine them all and select the ones that work best for you...I recommend one of each.

Microsoft OneNote
This is a free application that allows you to write, store, and update your work in the cloud. Much like the other Cloud Solutions I shared, OneNote is accessible to you as long as you have Internet access. Moreover, one of the pros is OneNote has a mobile application which allows you to move seamlessly across devices, from working on your laptop, to your tablet, to your mobile phone and back! The synchronization keeps your work updated with the latest changes, which is why I use this application for most of my work. When I'm traveling, waiting for a plane, or perhaps wake up at 2am with a brilliant idea or addition, I can break out my phone and update my work faster on my phone then I can power up another device, and because it saves automatically, the update is available for me to access from my other devices when I'm ready. Like Google Docs a con to OneNote is that unless you save each iteration of your document with a different name (Update March 3, Update Mar 4, etc.,) you won't have access to your previous amendments.

One reason I recommend using more than one of these applications to save your work is to reduce your chances for accidental erasure, forgetting where you stored your work, and providing a failsafe space for archiving. I have files dating back to 2008 in one or more of these free cloud storage resources and still go back from time to time to extract information, update or expand on old ideas and generate new ones. The piece of mind I gain from knowing my work is safe and accessible is invaluable to me; and after multiple computer upgrades and changes, washing and drying USB drives, external hard drive crashes, etc., etc., the freedom of being untethered to a physical drive has been priceless.

Google Drive
The first tool is found in your Google Drive. All you need is a Gmail account to access it. Much like the other cloud storage applications I'll mention in a bit, the Google Drive can be accessed from anywhere as long as you have Internet connectivity. One of the pros with cloud storage is releasing you from the tether of having to have your computer, your USB drive, or your external storage device in order to access and interact with your work. You can reach your work 24/7 365 from anyplace with Internet access. One of the cons of this cloud storage is the need for a comparable writing application for your work. In other words if you saved your work using a proprietary application found in Mac OS, Word Perfect, Adobe, etc., you will need access to the application or a comparable one in order to make modifications. Another con is that because the work is stored in the cloud, once you've made the modifications, you have to remember to save it back to the cloud from whatever system you are using. This is a bit of a manual process, but the 24/7 access makes it worth it.

Google Docs
In your Google Drive you can access your Google documents and use the Word feature to prepare your work. As with your Google Drive, it is held in the cloud - so as long as you have access to the Internet, you have access to your work. On of the pros is that when you prepare your research manuscript or work using Google docs it is automatically saved and does not require any effort on your part. While this is a pro - the con is that it overwrites whatever your changes were and there is not a way to recover previous editions unless you change the document name each time; Research Paper (Feb 2nd, Research Paper Feb 3rd, etc.) Not a huge inconvenience, but it is something to be aware of. Another con is that you have limited editing features and while you could save your document back and forth using Microsoft Word or an application like Libre Office, this manual manipulation does require some discipline on your part.

Box.com and Dropbox.com
Both of these are cloud-based storage applications that allow you to store you work in whatever format you like, and both applications are free and provide you with a couple of gigabytes of storage per email address. As with the Google Drive and Google Docs as long as you have access to the Internet, you have access to your work. There are lots of choices for free online storage, so if there is something else you are already comfortable using and it meets your needs, don't change. These just happen to be the ones that I use most often and have for several years.

The last bit of advice I have is to discipline yourself to save your work frequently, even if you rely on your Microsoft Word or Google Docs auto save feature, be intentional and specific about saving your work and you can significantly reduce your stress level!

For the purpose of this course, I want to introduce four elements that will help keep your research on track.

Let’s consider these elements the 'rules of the road' on your research journey, sort of like guard rails or warning signs.

As with most rules, there are exceptions that may be incorporated from time to time. But as an exercise in critical thinking, we'll try to stay as close to these 4 rules as possible.

To simplify this process, I’m going to use a generic topic from the social sciences - criminal justice, to demonstrate how these elements might support a research paper, proposal or project.
As you work through your research just substitute this topic or research field for your own. You’ll arrive at a similar conclusions.

Rule number 1: Your research topic should be between 2 - 5 words. If you did the previous exercise in converting your idea to a topic then you’re already ahead of the curve. Now as you build out your topic you might include connector words like "the", "and", "or" etc., to make it read like a topic. Another example might be “Using Drones in Law Enforcement”. This title is only 5 words long. If you are working from a directive given to you by an employer, your instructor etc., it will be absolutely worth your time and effort to reduce the topic to 2-5 words.

Rule number 2: Your research topic should not use any slang or jargon unless the slang or jargon is the focus of the research topic. Consider the previous example "Using Drones in Law Enforcement“ could have been “Cops Using Drones” where “cops” is a type of slang that might be accepted. I should remind you that ultimately your research is going to be read by professionals and those in or interested in the field, so any derogatory use of slang should be avoided.

Rule number 3: Your research topic should not be in the form of a question. We will get to how to incorporate a question into the title of your research in just a bit, but for now, follow the rule. Example of what not to do might be Why Do Police Use Drones?

Rule number 4: Your research topic must make sense without additional explanation. In the previous example it is clear that the topic of the research will involve some aspect of exploring, examining, evaluation or some sort of assessment of the use of Drones in Law Enforcement. If you’re unsure whether or not your topic meets this rule, simply pose it to someone. “Hi, I’m working on a research project, what comes to mind when you hear … whatever your topic is. If they need you to explain it then it doesn’t meet the rule.

Once you've settled on a topic, write it or type it at the top of your page, or screen. Or if you downloaded the Research Outline Worksheet provided, you can easily add the topic of your research there - then continue. Caution! Make sure you have a topic the follows the rules of the road before you move on.

Now let's move onto perhaps one of the most important aspects of actually getting your research read. Bear in mind that the goal of research should be to contribute to an existing body of work in the field. And the best way to do that is to have other scholars and professionals read your work. Consider for a moment the last time you browsed the shelves of a used book store, or yard sale and picked up a book just because of the title.

Whether you purchased it or not, the first thing that caught your attention was probably the title because it was interesting or intriguing. The same should be said of your research project!. Not boring

Consider that there are people browsing hundreds or thousands of research papers or projects regarding your topic. And just like you, they’re just as likely to pick up one that has an interesting or intriguing title. Now, it would be easy and disingenuous to title your research topic with something that sounds good but has not merit, and this isn’t what I’m suggesting at all.

The title of your research should be attention catching, but it also needs to be relevant to your research topic.

So that’s where we start.

Review your research topic and consider the following. What front page Headline or social media post would catch your attention with regard to your topic. In order to develop an interesting and not boring headline (or Title for your research), we’ll follow some of the same rules we used when developing the topic of your research.

Rule number 1: The headline must relate to your research topic. For example, if your research focuses on the field of agriculture and specifically with regard to the increased in-home or at-home gardens, title like “Microgreens Fill the Food Gap” might be eye catching. Maybe your research topic relates to the Fitness and Wellness of Students, so perhaps “Does Napping Improves Test Grades”, might attract a reader's attention. Perhaps your research is focuses on mental health wellness, and the headline “How Art Therapy Reduces Anxiety”, might catch a reader's attention. The more exciting and interesting the better – just make sure that its something that connects logically with to your research topic.

Rule number 2: You can't use any of the same words used in your research topic. This includes the connector words like "the", "and", "or" etc. This may be a little challenging at first, but I assure you it will be worth your honest efforts. For example, if the Research Topic is “Unmanned Aerial Systems in Policing” then a headline title might be “Cops Fight Crime Using Drones“. None of the original words from the Topic were used in the Headline, however the headline does connect to the topic. This is perhaps one of the only real challenging areas in this process, which is why it is so critical to get right.

Rule number 3: Your headline should be between 2-5 words, and not more than 5 words. Just as you might see in bold lettering on a newspaper, or social media post - one line short and sweet.

Rule number 4: Your headline must be dynamic, eye catching, or perhaps a little controversial. Your headline might make a statement or ask a question. “Should Cops Arm Drones?” “Are Armed Drones Legal?” In this way your headline is drawing the potential reader into reading the research to see how your research addressed the question or issue.

Rule number 5: Your headline must make sense without further explanation. As with your research Topic, if you have to explain it, then it isn’t a good headline.

Congratulations on making it to the halfway point!

So now that you have a solid Research Topic and a dynamic Newspaper headline, let’s put them together and create an eye-catching title for your Research project, paper, or proposal.

To begin - 
First - place a colon in the middle of a line on your screen or paper   ___________ : ____________ __________________

Next - on the left side of the colon write your newspaper headline. In the present example we’d write:

Does Community Policing Still Matter? : _____________________________________   _________________________________

Next - Immediately to the right side of the colon write the phrase words, "A Study of" and follow the phrase with your Research Topic. Using the present example, we see

Does Community Policing Still Matter?: A Study of the Effectiveness of Bike Patrols.

Congratulations! You now have a dynamic and interesting working research title for your research project proposal! As you continue you may find a reason to substitute a word or two, but for the moment you have a clear and interesting title.

Once you've constructed your Research Title, be sure to write it or type it at the top of your page. You can now discount the Newspaper headline as it has been integrated into your working title. If you downloaded the Research Outline provided, you can easily add the title of your research there - then continue. Caution! If you're developing your own research topic, then don't move past this step until you're at least marginally satisfied with the results.

Now let’s take a quick moment and get some perspective on what you’ve just created. Consider that you may have started this process with only a general notion as to what your research was going to be about. Now you have a research topic that will guide you, and several terms, words, and phrases related to your topic.

How to leverage your research title to mine for even more information!

It may help to think of how the results of your research might be significant to specific areas within your field.

In the previous examples the significance might read something like:
The results of this research may be used to inform trainers, recruiters, and decision-makers, considering adopting programs to enhance community satisfaction with police. The significance of the study isn’t essential in this process but having it available can help justify the level of work you invest in your research.

For the previous title one might expand your search for information to include:

Community Perception of Police Officers on Patrol
(with specific categories such as Vehicle, Motorcycle, Bicycle, Segway, Four-Wheeler, boats, drones, other aircraft or on foot, etc.)

Successful / Unsuccessful Community Policing Programs

Pros and Cons of Community Policing

Effective / Ineffective Police Patrol Techniques and Practices

Influence / Impact of Police Patrol Vehicles

How do other countries, nations, states, communities, etc., use or view Community Policing?

Take a moment and write down four or five terms or phrases you could search for to gain more information regarding your research topic and research title. (In the BONUS section, I share with you how you can create an auto-piloted and targeted search for these phrases to help locate previously published information about your topic.)

Always remember the goal of your research:
Research should contribute something to your field. Whether that’s confirmational information using the results from previous studies, assessing the validity of previous work, or expanding beyond original research.

Without a clear goal in mind, your research is likely to either never be completed, or not have an understandable link to the field. So, to inform your potential readers up front as to the purpose for your research, it’s wise to prepare a Purpose Statement - will get to that in just a bit.

Now that we have a solid research topic and an interesting research title, let’s take the next step and ‘niche down’ where we want to focus our research efforts. We do that by identifying a problem with regard to the topic, as supported by the research title. We’ll reflect this process as developing a Problem Statement. When you think of a ‘problem’ look at it from the standpoint of an opportunity for you to investigate an issue, rather than searching for solutions to a problem as you might normally do.

Also, in the context of research a problem isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just something that draws you interest, and potentially, that of your reader and gives you the flexibility to explore it from a variety of perspectives.

As you can imagine, given this wide ranging definition there are probably dozens of problems you could explore with regard to yours research topic. So we want to narrow the field just a bit and focus on something important (or important to you) as well as something that will contribute to the existing body of work. One way to narrow your focus is to use a simple brainstorming technique. As with all things research, there are dozens of potentially good brainstorming techniques you can apply. Let me introduce you to one that I find simple and straightforward:

Step 1) Take some post it notes or 3 X 5 Index cards and write one problem or issue that you’d like to examine or explore on each of the notes or cards. It’s perfectly fine if you come up with a dozen or more because your still in the brainstorming process.

Once you’ve got some to work with, shuffle them about and put them in order of from most immediately impactful to least immediately impactful.

Once you’ve got your ranking, select the top 3-5 top issues you want to examine.

Based on our research Topic and Research Title, here are a few that were generated from the example provided:

1. Do bike patrols decrease crime in the United States?

2. Do bike patrols decrease crime in Californian communities?

3. Do bike patrols influence the public's perception of police?

4. Do bike patrols enhance community policing?

5. Should police abandon bike patrols and walk a beat?

Once you've assembled your list, select the one that best captures your intent for your research project. For this example, "Do bike patrols influence the public's perception of police?" was selected.

Step 2) Review your selected problem closely to insure it is something you can find existing research on. A simple way to check is to type it into your favorite search engine, or even Wikipedia to check for existing research, and see what appears. If you find little to no research information on your topic problem, then you might be looking at a highly specialized area. Depending on your timeline for completing your research as well as any stipulations, this may be a perfect problem to blaze the trail on. If so, congratulations! Particularly if you are doing open-ended funded research, this revelation may pave your way to sustained funding to completion!

On the other hand, if you are reliant on limited funding or are limited by time or other available resources, you may want to consider a problem that has been tangentially explored so as to be able to support your research topic and research goals. Often you will find at the end of previous research relevant your topic, suggestions for further research on problems similar to ones you've selected.

Step 3) Ensure the problem is something you can create a 10 question anonymous survey instrument to address the question. For the purpose of this course, 10-15 questions should be optimal to collect the information needed. This will also help you to focus your questions tightly on the problem and not be distracted by other issues. In the example provided, the problem of "Do bike patrols influence the public's perception of police?" can be examined using a survey instrument. Whereas the first problem is a national question and the second is a state-wide question. If you have the resources to conduct a national, or even a state-wide compare and contrast states using bike patrols and those without, and evaluate crime events for each you may be able to adequately address that problem. If, however, such resources are not readily available or the research requirement is intentionally "niche" to a local community or local area, then creating and deploying an survey instrument may be easier.

Step 4) Begin a sentence with the phrase, "It is not known how or to what extent" or "There is a gap in the literature regarding" and follow the phrase with the problem you selected for your research. Continuing with the previous example, the Problem Statement might read: "It is not known how or to what extent bike patrols influence the public's perception of the police." As you can tell, the specificity of the problem allows a more targeted and focused approach. The possibility that previous research has been done is increased if bike patrols exist, since there is nearly always an audit conducted on the return on investment for the implementation of such measures.

Similarly, your research problem may or may not be unique to your local, population, or demographics; but it may have been done elsewhere by someone else, under similar or different conditions. Why not examine what previous researchers did and avoid any errors or shortfalls they encountered?

Once you've settled on a problem (issue to focus your research on), write it or type it at the top of your page. If you downloaded the Research Outline provided, you can easily add the Problem under your Research title - then continue. Caution! It's best to start with the issue you selected, but don't discard the other issues you identified. As you collect information to support your research you will invariably come across data that focuses on one or more of the problems you didn't select. When that happens, simply jot them down in your notes for you to revisit later. Never discard any of your working information.

The next step is to explain why you are conducting your research. Specifically, why this topic and why this problem. In other words you’re focusing on the Purpose for your research and perhaps why it matters. It’s got to be more than just a grade if your in an academic setting, or more than just an assigned task if you’re being funded or directed to complete the research. The research must make some sort of difference or else it’s little more than a reflection paper or an interesting personal perspective.

It may help to think of how specifically [your research results might be significant to specific areas within your field. In the present example, the significance might read something like:

"The results of this research could be used to inform trainers, recruiters and decision-makers, with regard to adopting programs to enhance community satisfaction with police."

The significance of the study isn’t necessarily vital in this process, but having it available can help justify the level of work you invest in your research.

That said, it’s important to remember that the goal of your research should, at the very least, contribute something to your field. Whether that’s conformational information regarding similar studies, an assessment of the validity of previous work, the genesis of original research or some other purpose. Without a clear goal in mind, your research is very likely to either never be completed, or not have an understandable link to the field. So in order to inform your potential readers up front as to the purpose for your research, it’s wise to prepare a Purpose Statement.

The Purpose Statement is a way to keep yourself on track regarding the ultimate goal or aim of your research. As you engage with your research project proposal you will invariably come across very interesting information that doesn't 'speak' into the purpose for your research. These types of distractions are a leading contributor to researchers not completing their research. It is very easy to get distracted into examining tertiary or tangential issues to your research. Using the previous example, one could easily be distracted into examining motorcycle patrols, mounted horse patrols, Segway patrols, and similar forms of transportation and their influence on the public's perception of police.

Note that while each of these modes of transportation are valid and in use by police, the focus of this example research is bike patrols.

Step 1) Begin a sentence with the phrase, "The purpose of this study is to examine..." or "The purpose of this study is to explore..." then follow the phrase with the problem statement you constructed. Continuing with the previous example, the Purpose Statement might read: "The purpose of this study is to examine how and to extent bike patrols influence the public's perception of police."

Once you've constructed your Purpose Statement, write it or type it at the top of your page. If you downloaded the Research Outline provided, you can easily add the Purpose Statement under your Problem Statement - then continue. Caution! Make every effort to stay laser focused on the purpose for your research. If you discover other areas that could become your focus, jot them down in your notes so you can revisit them later as you progress through your research. Never discard any of your working information.

This BONUS is only available to students!

So the first application tool you can use in order to automate your research is simply the Google Alerts application. To use it you will need a Gmail account to get started. You can get emails when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. For example, you can get info about news, products, and other information sent directly to your in-box.

The second application is Talk Walker. TalkWalker is an incredibly powerful social media analytics tool & social media monitoring tool recommended by brands and agencies worldwide. Similar to Google Alerts, you can have specific information sent directly to your email when you set it up correctly.

You may be wondering how getting more emails will help you automate your search? To begin with, when you are conducting research you have lots of options across the Internet. In fact the Internet is chock full of useful and not so useful information, and you can spend hours mining for data only to hit a dead end. Using these tools is a way to automate that research and free you up to do other things.

The more specific your phrase, term, word, product or title, the cleaner your search results will be.
Caution: The more specific your search the smaller your search results will be. If what you are looking for is called something different, referred to by a different name than the one you used to search, or simply spelled differently, your search efforts might miss them. Therefore - although you can be specific, in most cases you'll want to be a little less so, to ensure you collect everything possibly relevant.

Attached are links to the sites and this tutorial will show you how to use them.

If you've followed the process (rules of the road) as I've outlined them, these four sentence stems will help guide your research paper, project, or proposal, so I recommend you keep them handy and refer to them often. As with any "guide", they are of no use to you if you don't follow them.

The four sentence stems you should recall are:
My Research Topic is:
My Research Title is:
My Problem Statement is:
My Purpose Statement is:

Bear in mind as you ‘brainstorm’ topics and titles, to save everything you come up with, even if you don’t intent to use them right now for whatever reason. You may end up with dozens of words or phrases that “sound” like good topics or titles, but don’t quite tick the box for you. Keep the list because it will come in very handy when you get more heavily into the “research phase” itself.

In this instance, your initial goal is to outline the first three Chapters of your research paper, project, or proposal.

Chapter 1 Introduction – This section addressed the “What” question of your research
Chapter 2 Literature Review – In addition to addressing what has previously been done in relationship to your research topic, this section speaks to the question of “Why” your research might be different and contribute to what has already been done in the field of discipline.

Chapter 3 Methodology – This element of your research focuses on the “How.” Specifically, how you plan to conduct your research. Depending on your goals, you might consider conducting Observations, Surveys, Interviews, Focus Groups, Experiments, or perhaps Secondary Data Analysis / Archival Studies, or some combination or Mixed Methods.

Regardless, here’s how the sentence stems might connect with your chapter outlines.