2.2.3: Planning Your Research Process

Planning Your Research Process

A research project can vary when it comes to how long it takes from start to finish. Creating a timeline is essential to keeping your project on track and making sure you’re building in enough time to work on your research. As you start the work and gain more experience, you’ll learn the planning strategies that work best for you and what processes take more time than others. This lesson provides just one way to do this and is merely a suggestion of how you could plan out your research. If you’re not at the stage of planning a research project quite yet, consider coming back to this topic when you are ready.

There are different levels of tasks that will fill up your timeline — big, medium, and small. Big tasks are those that will take up most of your time like coding your data for analysis and writing. Medium tasks could be steps like reading the articles you’ve selected for your literature reviewLiterature Review The process of summarizing, synthesizing and/or critiquing literature around a specific topic/idea. This work can help a researcher understand what has happened before and also how past research intersects and or diverges from other research. A literature review can be a full-length manuscript or a subsection within a larger research article. or talking about your research idea with someone in your support ecosystem. Small tasks could be formatting tables or answering emails.

Activity

Complete the following activity in your LPOL Workbook. This activity will help you work toward a final curriculum deliverable, and it will help you develop your overall research plan.

First, let’s think back to the steps in the research process outlined in 2.2.1. These could be considered your big tasks. Write down each step as a task. Here are some examples:

• Identify a problem or question that interests you (if you’ve already completed Course 1, look back at the work you did in Lesson 2 on Brainstorming Research Questions and Goal Brainstorming. If you haven’t done this yet, consider going back to do this as you work on this task.)
• Finalize your research question.
• Determine what kind of scholarly output that you want to share your research.
• Conduct a literature review.
• Determine your methods and methodologyMethodology The theoretical framework that informs how a researcher approaches their work and what methods are used to collect data..
• Collect your data.
• Analyze your findingsResults The section of a research article where researchers share the results from the research. This section takes the results and directly connects them to the research questions or hypotheses posed at the start of the article. Also can be called “Findings.” .
• Write your piece.
• Disseminate your work.

Next, add in your medium tasks to this list.

• Build in time for selecting conferences where you could present your initial findings and make note of proposal deadlines.
• Build in time for selecting journals that align with your work and review their past issues.
• Conduct one in-depth interviewIn-depth interview A research method that is a conversation with an interviewee to learn about an identified research topic. An in-depth interview is conducted one-on-one, uses open-ended questioning, probes as needed to go more in-depth, and feels like a conversation between two people. per day for two weeks.
• Code one interview transcript each week.
• Write for 1 hour every day.
• Write in timelines for submission processes.

Throughout the process, as much as you can, add in reminders for the small tasks you know will pop up in the meantime as well as the professional or personal tasks you want to keep track of. Use the 2.2.3: Planning Your Research worksheets in your LPOL Workbook as a guide. Part One will help you break up your tasks based on size and Part Two will help you put these tasks in chronological order.

After you think you’ve written everything you can anticipate on your list, organize it chronologically and create monthly and weekly goals for yourself. Perhaps you want to use a color-coding system to differentiate the level of your tasks, or maybe you work better with a timeline that works backwards (One year out, I will do __. Six months out, I will do __.)

Now design your timeline in the format that works best for you. Are you someone who likes using a physical planner, or maybe a task manager web tool like Notion or Trello? However you choose to create your timeline, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Make sure your timeline is easily editable.
• If the big tasks are too overwhelming to schedule, consider breaking them down into smaller tasks.
• Identify which tasks need to be completed before another is started so that you don’t feel like you’re juggling too much at once.
• Build in extra time for things that you know will be particularly challenging, but also make room for taking care of yourself along the way — it’s important to center your personal needs first!

If you know a particular time of year will be busy for you in other areas of your life, consider shifting your research timeline or building in more time for yourself. You won’t always be able to anticipate when life events arise, but being flexible and understanding with yourself will make it easier when you need to edit your timeline down the road.