Justifying Your Study

One way in which research differs from other forms of inquiry is that you need to justify virtually everything that you do. Your critics can challenge the validity or relevance of your findings if they believe there was something non-typical about the people you selected for study, something biased in the way you selected people for study, something unfair about the groups you compared, something wrong with the way you phrased your questions, and so forth. Every aspect of your study design has an influence on what you will learn from the study.

Therefore, you need to have a rationale for every aspect of your study. To see how this rationale makes a differences, imagine that you are reading two different studies with similar designs and research methods, but with different rationales. Which would you find more persuasive?