Design Elements

Research designs are often divided up in terms of experiments, quasi-experiments, simulations, and field studies, with field studies further divided into surveys, ethnographic studies (participant observation) and archival studies. This is useful but mixes up design issues with data sources.

Another approach is to construct a typology based on the underlying design elements, such as whether the study includes an intervention, whether it collects data at multiple points in time, and what kind of variance or diversity there is in the variables.