To ensure that, the research knowledge is to be considered as scientific knowledge, scholars go through certain procedures. Those procedure will be discussed in the research process. Moreover, research process is a vast subject of study however, for understanding the fundamentals of the process, it is confined and explained, in six steps below;
Step One: Define the Problem
Every social research has topic and purpose, it may be regarding unemployment or poverty. Topic can be selected through personal observation or secondary data. However, researcher have to choose a topic which should be confined and focused on a specific social issue, furthermore, researcher should be clear about, what he want to achieve from the research? In simple words researcher should be clear about the purpose of research. Let’s take an example of research topic or problem, researcher might be interested in conducting a research on “high unemployment rate in African American community”. Researcher might conduct research on this topic, with the assumption, “Racial discrimination is the cause of unemployment”. Moreover, when research topic and purpose are clear and carefully selected then researcher can proceed his research.
Step Two: Literature Review
Literature review is the part of research where, researcher review all the social researches similar to his research topic. It provides clear picture of specific social problem and explore the associated theories related to the problem. Moreover, literature review helps the researcher to identify those areas of social problem, on which research has not been conducted in past. It also saves the researcher, from duplicating research. Furthermore, researcher also gets an idea during literature review that, which research method should be applied on the social issue. The theoretical approaches; discovered through literature review related to research topic, helps the researcher in developing questionnaire and interview questions; which are data collection tools as discussed earlier. Review of the literature is considered as the back bone of research, in addition, it helps the researcher in identifying the variables required for developing questionnaire and testing hypothesis. If we continue the above example of “high unemployment rate in African American community”, the variables could be race and unemployment. After collecting data, it will depend upon the research design that, which method would be used in analyzing or testing data.
Step Three: Generate Hypothesis
Hypothesis are the assumptions behind research, on basis of which research is conducted. Let’s put it in this way, the purpose behind conducting research is to prove or disapprove the research assumption. These assumption are the mysteries which researcher is trying to resolve by, conducting research. Hypothesis should be clear and measureable, hypothesis of the above example could be “Racial discrimination is the cause of unemployment”.
Step Four: Research Methodology
In this step researcher choose the research method may be one or more. Selecting research method depends upon research topic and hypothesis. Sometimes some research methods are not applicable on certain type of research. However, in research methodology research method is not only thing to be decided by researcher. Researcher has to decide sampling technique, data collection instrument and statistical method for testing hypothesis. Suppose if data collection instrument is questionnaire then researcher have to decide which scale should be used to get better output from testing data. Data can be analyze through frequency distribution and graphical representation of tabulation or it can be analyzed through multivariate data analysis techniques.
Step Five:Data Collection
As discussed earlier, data can be collected from different methods, through questionnaire, interview, observation and secondary data analysis. Literature review is the part, where researcher perform secondary data analysis, analyzing the past researches which are similar to his research. Moreover data collection through questionnaire is asking the same set of question from different individuals, questionnaire may be close ended or open ended again depends on the research. Data should be collected and recorded carefully by researcher because, on the basis of the data, research hypothesis is tested and concluded.
Step Six: Analyze and Interpret the Results
After data collection researcher analyze data with the help of statistical methods. For data analysis researcher might use simple frequency distribution or may use multivariate data analysis. Whatever technique is better for testing the hypothesis and justifying result should be used by the researcher. After the analysis of data, researcher should interpret the results by accepting and rejecting hypothesis. Tabulation and graphs also requires interpretation. For example 60% of unemployed African American lives in bad school district. It explains the relationship between the unemployment and low educational standard in school. Which imply that, low educational standard in schools might results in unemployment.
