How to Think About Your Research

This book is running in a long beta. Revisions are currently underway. Check back in January 2025 for updated content.

Most research can be categorized into three main types. Basic or conceptual research is when we explore ideas or theories for the purpose of developing new concepts or reinterpreting existing ones. Applied research goes a step further by moving closer towards a solution for an immediate problem.

And then, practical research provides direct answers for what we should do to fix a problem. If you are conducting basic research, your argument should be largely theoretical with your contributions seeking to advance theoretical understanding.

In applied research, the way your topic is problematized should derive from a practical, empirical, methodological, and/or theoretical argument and provide potential implications for addressing one or more of those areas. Practical research is also problem-centric, usually contextualized around a lack of resources for achieving expected outcomes.

These types can be viewed on a continuum of purely conceptual to purely practical, and a whole world of research in between. In the following sections, we will focus on empirical research writing in any of the research types, but if you are completing other types of writing (e.g., a state-of-the-art review, model development article, or conference paper), the skills you acquire will help you write those pieces as well. They just won’t be the emphasis here.

With this said, what type of research will you be writing?