CHAPTER PREVIEW
When most students are learning about research, they typically are not aware of how many decisions are made in putting a project together. You will find that when you read a journal article, you learn only what the researchers finally did, not what they tried that didn't work. The reason for this lack of information is that journal space is in short supply. There is always more to print than the journals have space for. As a result, authors omit just about everything not entirely germane to the topic they are studying. The authors report only what was successful. If you want to plan your own research project, you can use the information in published work, but you have to fill in a lot of details on your own. You can be sure that in virtually every research program ever conducted, the researchers made choices that caused them to stop and evaluate what they were doing and make changes to improve the research design.
Some of the tasks associated with completing a study include describing in concrete terms the concepts you are interested in, figuring out how to measure them, identifying those you will test in your study, carrying out the project itself, looking at and understanding the results, then interpreting what you've discovered. If you make poor choices or conclusions at any step along the way, your research will be less meaningful than it could otherwise be.
In each case, the choices you make will each take you in a slightly different direction than some other choice. Each of these steps will involve making quite a few decisions that, you hope, will provide you with a clear answer to your original question.
Practical Questions in Planning Research
When you read about successful research projects either in a scientific journal or in a popular magazine or when you see a report on television, the reporter makes the research sound as if it were put together perfectly and that there was only one reasonable way to have conducted it. In reality, if you were to follow a research project from beginning to end, you would see that the researchers had to make a great number of decisions about the study.
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