I have just completed the giant task that is Assessment 2 in ETL567. This assessment involved comparing two research articles in regard to their overall research design and the strengths and weaknesses of the two studies. I won’t dive into the nitty-gritty of the analysis of the two articles, but I my big take away from this assignment has been that there is research, and then there is research.

Before undertaking any research, first there must be a strong understanding of the problem and then framing questions around this problem. It then needs to be decided how the questions are going to be answered. Are the questions framed around people’s experiences or can they be objectively measured and generalised around the sample population? Or, perhaps, it’s a bit of column A and a bit of column B. The answer to these questions will decide the paradigm of the study. Answers that can be measured and generalised will fit within a positivist paradigm. The answers around people’s experiences will fit within a interpretivist paradigm, and the combination of the two fits with a post-positivist or mixed-methods approach.

The methodology needs to match the paradigm. Typically, positivist research uses quantitative methodology, interpretivist research uses qualitative methodology and mixed methods is a combination of the two. There are a wide range of methods that can be used within these paradigms and methodologies, but must be selected appropriately to answer the research question/s. The same applies to the data collection techniques that are available under each method.

When the paradigm, methodology, method or data collection technique are selected inappropriately, then it affects the strength of the study.