Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign
This book introduces a new way of thinking about research designs in the social sciences. Our hope is that this approach will make it easier to develop and to share strong research designs.
At the heart of our approach is the MIDA framework, in which a research design is characterized by four elements: a model, an inquiry, a data strategy, and an answer strategy. We have to understand each of the four on their own and also how they interrelate. The design encodes your beliefs about the world, it describes your questions, and it lays out how you go about answering those questions, both in terms of what data you collect and how you analyze it. In strong designs, choices made in the model and inquiry are reflected in the data and answer strategies, and vice-versa.
We think of designs as objects that can be interrogated. Each of the four design elements can be “declared” in computer code and – if done right – the information provided is enough to “diagnose” the quality of the design through computer simulation. Researchers can then select the best design for their purposes by “redesigning” over alternative, feasible designs.
This way of thinking pays dividends at multiple points in the research design lifecycle: planning the design, implementing it, and integrating the results into the broader research literature. The declaration, diagnosis, and redesign process informs choices made from the beginning to the end of a research project.