3.1: Choosing a Research Methodology

The first step in research is to know what the situation calls for in terms of the formality or rigour of research required. Although formal research carefully documents sources with citations and references, most messages relay informal research. For instance, when you quickly look up some information you have access to and email it to the person who requested it, you’re serving up informal research. Either way, you apply skills in retrieving and delivering the needed information to meet your audience’s needs, often by paraphrasing or summarizing, which are extremely valuable skills coveted by employers. Knowing what research type or “methodology” the situation calls for—formal or informal research, or primary or secondary research—in the first place will keep you on track in this still-preliminary stage of the writing process.

The research methodology where you look up information and serve it up in an email answering someone’s question without needing to formally cite your sources is informal research. It is by far the most common type of research because any professional does it several times a day in their routine communication with the various audiences they serve. Say your manager emails asking you to recommend a new printer to replace the one that’s dying. You’re no expert on printers but you know who to ask. You go to Erika, the admin. assistant in your previous department, and she says to definitely go with the Ricoh printer. You trust what she says, so you end your research there and pass along this recommendation to your manager. Now, you can’t really have 100% confidence in the recommendation you pass along because your source, whom you don’t necessarily need to identify in informal research, was relatively subjective. She may have just become accustomed to using the Ricoh and found it reliable, but she didn’t provide you a full analysis of its pros and cons in comparison to other available printers. Erika just gave her general impression and endorsement based on her personal experience of using it. This type of research will do in a pinch when you’re short on time and your audience doesn’t need to check your sources.

Formal research, on the other hand, takes a more systematic approach. It documents the sources of information you compile using a conventional citation and reference system designed to make it easy for your readers to check out your sources themselves to verify their credibility (trustworthiness). Formal research is more scientific in discovering needed information or solving a problem in that it begins with a hypothesis (your main idea when you begin, which, in the case above, is that the Ricoh might be the best printer). It then tests that hypothesis in a rigorous way. In this case, you would come up with a set of criteria by which to assess potential printers, including certain features and capabilities that you need your printer to have, their cost, warranty and service plan, availability, etc. Next, you would look at all the accessible literature on the printers available to you, including the product webpages and spec manuals, customer reviews from various retailers, and reviews from unbiased, reputable sources such as Consumer Reports. Finally, like the researchers at Consumer Reports, you would test the printers yourself, scoring each according to your assessment criteria, ranking the best to worst, and reporting the results.

Formal research obviously requires more time, labour, practice, skill, and resources in following a rigorous procedure. In the case of the printer research above, having a subscription to Consumer Reports saves you the effort of performing all the formal research yourself while still giving you access to valuable information not available to everyone. If you simply googled “best office printer,” you may get a Consumer Reports ranking as one of your top results, but when you follow the links, you’ll get to a subscription pricing page rather than the list you’re looking for. A large part of the internet exists on the other side of paywalls. For this reason, it wasn’t included in the training data of your go-to AI, so AI isn’t necessarily the most reliable guide in such situations either.

As a college student, however, you can access Consumer Reports via your college library account if its journal and magazine databases subscribe to it; as an employee, you would depend on your workplace having a private subscription. Then, applying your formal research skills, you can search for office printers and get a handy ranking of the latest multifunctional printers for the modern office. You check out their selection criteria and determine that their number-one choice is the right printer for your needs, so you respond to your manager with the make and model number. Finally, to prove that the recommendation comes from a reputable authority, you cite the Consumer Reports article showing the author, year, title, and retrieval information. Your manager can thus verify that you used a reputable, current source.

But why go to so much trouble? Why not just look briefly at all the options and follow your gut? Well, your gut isn’t much help when you’re in over your head. If you’re going to spend a few thousand dollars on the best printer, you’re going to want to do it right. You don’t want to waste money on one that has several problems that you could have known about beforehand had you done your homework. You may also regret paying top-dollar for a printer that turns out to do far more than you need because the AI you used to recommend one couldn’t access all the key information locked up behind paywalls that would have led you to the most suitable model. In this case, proper formal research (“doing your homework”) protects you against such preventable losses.

Like formal vs. informal research, primary vs. secondary has much to do with the level of rigour. Basically, primary research generates new knowledge and secondary research applies it. In the above case, the experts and authors of the Consumer Reports article conducted primary research. They systematically came up with the assessment criteria, arranged for access to all the printers, tested and scored each according to how well they performed against each criterion, analyzed the data, determined the ranking of best to worst printer on the market, and reported it in a published article. If you can’t conduct primary research yourself because you don’t have easy access to all the printers worth considering, you can be thankful someone else has and would even pay money for that intel.

Rest assured, however, that the only primary research you are likely to do at the college level will be small, low-stakes, and narrow in scope. For instance, you may have assignments requiring you to do the following:

• Design a questionnaire and use it to conduct a survey of classmates’ attitudes on a certain subject
• Interview a professional and record their answers after having come up with the questions
• Observe customer behaviour in a retail setting and note recurring patterns

Case-study field research and the follow-up analysis you might do may also count as primary research, but it will likely be focused on real-world, applied situations.

Secondary research is what most people—especially students—do for academic and professional tasks because it involves finding and using primary research or other secondary research. To use the printer example above, accessing the Consumer Reports article and using its recommendation to make a case for office printer selection was secondary research. Depending on whether that secondary research is informal or formal, it may or may not cite and reference sources.

The easiest, most common, and most expedient research, the kind that the vast majority of informative workplace communication involves, is informal secondary research. As when an employee sends company pricing and scheduling information in response to a request from a potential customer, informal secondary research involves quickly retrieving and relaying information without citing it—not out of laziness or intentional plagiarism, but because formal citations are neither necessary for the task nor expected by the audience.

When you do a school research assignment requiring you to document your sources, however, and if your manager requires you to document the sources you used as a basis for endorsing an office printer in a recommendation report (because it will be an expensive investment), for example, you perform formal secondary research. In business, the latter type is best for ensuring that company resources are used appropriately and can be verified and supported by all stakeholders. In other words, formal secondary research is a necessary part of a business’s due diligence. In the following section (§3.2), we will break down the labour-intensive process of building a document around source material collected through formal secondary research.