Communication Research Strategies

AI art created by Aaron Bowen

This page offers you resources describing different research methods.  In other words, literature describing ways that you can approach the research question you have defined.

There are multiple standard methods of conducting research -- conducting a survey, holding one or more focus groups, etc.  These two examples respectively employ a survey methodology and a focus group methodology.  What's more, there are thousands of individual variations on these standard forms of methodology.  Each survey will have its own individual characteristics, and occur in its own contextual manner.  Thus, the process through which researchers design the survey and gather responses will have its own individual characteristics in comparison to other surveys.  Mixed methods -- the combining of two or more methodologies to explore a research question -- complicates the big picture of what methodology is even further.

The literature presented in the resources below can help you get oriented to the different forms of methodology, and select the most appropriate methods (including mixed methods) to address your research question.