3: Research questions and research design

Publication Date:
20 Jul 2021
Pages:
39–68
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447351115.ch003
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This chapter discusses accessibility as an overall consideration in research design. We start by examining how a research question might touch on questions of accessibility, and how accessibility can be built into the research design through suitable choices of methodology; we do this while acknowledging the limitations in scope and feasibility, particularly for student research projects. We outline which factors may affect participation generally, as well as in specific forms of research, such as case studies and longitudinal research. We talk about sources of support and advice at this stage and in this context we also cover the use of reference groups. We discuss the use of secondary data and its implications, and look at how accessibility issues might be approached in the context of applying for ethics approval.

In the social sciences we should make sure that the findings and any policy decisions based on them are applicable and useful to as many from the underlying population as possible. This translates into the requirement for a sample that is both sufficiently large and sufficiently representative of the corresponding population. That said, it has different implications for qualitative and quantitative research that we will make it explicit in subsequent chapters (in Chapter 4 we discuss recruiting strategies for both approaches).

The extent to which findings from a study’s sample can be applied to the population as a whole is referred to as representativeness in quantitative research, and it is threatened when participation is biased through the absence of some groups or over-representation of others.

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