Writing Strategies for Identify Pre-Study Decisions

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Identify Pre-study Details includes nearly any information that the reader needs to know prior to the actual step-by-step procedures of acquiring the data, implementing a study design, or analyzing the data. You can identify details prior to the study description by using several sub-strategies:

• identify methodological approach or design
• describe the setting, and/or 
• introducing subjects/participants

Let us start with identifying the methodological approach or design. There exist many research designs, but all fall roughly into three approaches: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods. Within these approaches, you may follow a specific design or choose a cross-disciplinary approach. For example, you may take a cross-sectional, repeated cross-sectional, or longitudinal design to describe when data are collected. Also, you may have heard of independent measures, repeated measures, and matched pairs for describing how participants/subjects are allocated to different groups. In many life science, physical science, and social science disciplines, you may want to consider the number of treatments, a full description of how the treatments were arranged, and the number of replications or observations. For qualitative research, you may want to consider sharing your epistemological stance and theoretical foundation.

If it is a common practice in your discipline to state the methodological approach used in research articles, then you may locate this type of information either near the beginning of sample articles’ Methods section or at the beginning of its Data Analysis section. Here are two examples:

a. This study is based in a quasi-experimental design, which was carried out in two stages over 11 weeks.

b. A mixed methodology was adopted for data collection and analysis.

In both examples, there are limited details about the design. In Example a, indication that the study is “quasi-experimental” is often sufficient for a reader. However, Example b would often be followed by more information about the mixed methodology such as whether the mixing of methods happens during data collection, analysis, or interpretation should also be considered.

If you do not know much about methodological approaches and experimental designs, you are encouraged to consult with your research mentor. There is often a discipline-specific research methods course or materials that go beyond the scope of this book to help you.

Describing the setting is a sub-strategy used to present the characteristics of the environment in which the study was conducted (including place, temperature, time of the year, etc). These details help the reader situate the study in time and/or space and also help greatly in ensuring the replicability of the Methods. Readers want to gain just enough information that they can easily infer how the results may transfer or be generalized to their context. For example, if you are conducting agricultural research, readers want to know if similar findings may be observed in the research conducted in their own unique setting. To do so, they will need information about the climate. If you are working in educational settings, the classroom environment including access to resources, size of the school and classroom, and perhaps even the layout of the classrooms may be necessary to describe. Here is an example of describing the setting:

c. The study took place at a public research university, located in south central United States.

Example c illustrates how the local context of the public university is not explicitly named, but details are sufficient for relating the context to other similar settings where the study may be replicated.

Introducing the subjects/participants is used to identify and describe original characteristics, properties, origins, number, composition/construction, etc. Details about the process by which they were recruited/selected/obtained may also be included. A common practice is to provide these pre-study details in separate subsections to differentiate this information from the experimental procedure. Research not involving human participants or animal subjects will not likely utilize this Strategy.

Below are some additional Language Use patterns to help you understand the sub-strategies of Identify Pre-study Details. Be on the lookout for more as you analyze published work in your field.