study design and data collection

You've selected your research topic, developed a research question and hypothesis. Now it's time to design your research proposal and collect data to test your hypothesis.

Design

You've decided what question you want to answer, now it's time to figure out how to answer it.

There are a few really important questions you will need to answer when designing your research proposal...

• Procedure: What will you do? Do you want to ask people to answer questions? Do you want to do a literature review? Make a set of observations?

• Measures: What materials will you need?

• Participants: Who do you want to study? How many people will you need to test?

• Manipulation: Will different people have different testing questions?

Method

There are a lot of different methods that developmental scientists use to answer their research questions. Your research methodology involves considering what you'll do to answer your research question and how you'll do it.

For example, if we want to ask students to answer a set of questions about their favorite food in the cafeteria, we would create a survey (the WHAT). Now we need to decide how we'll administer the survey - which could be in-person or online (the HOW).

**Do you think your response to the question would change depending on whether an experimenter was standing in front of you compared to responding on your phone?**

These are things we need to think about when deciding how to collect data.

Consider how YOU would like to collect data and ask your mentor for advice! Learn more about different methods you could use for your research proposal below.