[MUSIC] Hello everyone, welcome to this video about how to choose your strategy. As mentioned in the previous video, the nature of your recent objective largely decides which strategy is necessary to achieve it. Other important aspects are the number of units that you will use, or that are available, and the number of variables in your conceptual framework. We will now look at how the different research strategies score on this aspect. When your objective is to describe a problem or situation, or the test a certain theory, and you have a large number of variables and a large number of units available, the survey would be the best strategy to achieve your objective. An example would be the research by Hamad that you will hear more about this week. He wanted to research how a set number of aspects influences the choice to use the bicycle to commute in Rotterdam. With a large number of units, inhabitants of Rotterdam is employment within a cycling distance. And many aspects that may influence his choice in transport, the survey was the right strategy to choose. You could use the experiment as a strategy when you're objective is to test the theory. But in a situation where there a relatively large number of units available and a small number of variables used, an experiment is especially strong on causality, that is to say, one thing leading to another. In an urban context, researchers often opt for quasi experiments, because the requirements for a full experiment cannot be met. For example, if you want to do an experiment in which you measure the impact of a certain policy, often this policy has already been implemented and therefore it is difficult to measure the situation before. In that case, you would have to use a quasi experiment. But more on that later this week. If the research objective is to explore, to describe, or to explain a situation or problem in which the researcher wants to gather new information from a small number of units but with a lot number of variables, then the case study is the best choice. These three are strategies for empirical research for which you need to conduct field work. But you may also choose to work with secondary data sets. It is not apart of our scheme here, because you may choose to use secondary data in different situations. We go deeper into that option in the video on desk research. For now, we know how to decide which research study is most appropriate in different situations. Did you get it right? In this case, in the case of this research question, the best strategy would be a case study. Specifically, you would use a comparative case study in which you choose several cases on social housing project with different modes of financing. Remember though, the choice in research strategy may sometimes be between a more and a less adequate option. Choosing the less adequate is not necessarily wrong. However, it should be done with reason, the choice for a research strategy is only wrong if it affects the validity of the research negatively. Therefore, it is crucial to understand and get the validity of a research. In week one, we discussed the importance of the concepts, validity and reliability in academic research. In the technical design of your research, there are several instances in which you have to be concerned about the impact of your choices on the validity and reliability of your research. The choice of research strategy is one of these instances. The external validity questions, whether the results of a study can be generalized to a larger population. This is especially relevant in a testing research, where the researcher wants to test a certain theory or hypothesis in an empirical situation. To check the internal validity one should ask, has the researcher really measured what he or she intended to measure? And can the effect observed in the dependent variable be attributed to the change in the independent variable? A research should always be valid. Why is the choice of research strategy so important for validity? In the session on research question, we mentioned that the variables in the research question should be able to vary. They should be able to take different values, in the research strategy you should allow the variables to vary. This means in the first place that your strategy should include sufficient observations. In a single observation, like one case, at a single moment in time or one respondent, the variables cannot vary. How many observation should you have? We could say the more, the better, but, of course, this depends on several factors. The first one, for testing research using quantitative data for statistical analysis, you need more observations than for qualitative research. The second one, some research subjects, also called unit of analysis, are less numerous than others. For example, the city has many households, also many businesses, but only few institutions dealing with specific policies like a tax office. Studies with these type of institutions as research subjects would therefore have a limited number of observations. How to choose the right type of variation of your variables. This depends on the nature of your research question. Do you have a clearly defined independent variable, and you want to know how it influences the dependent variable? Then your research design should allow your independent variable to take on different values. Then you can see whether the dependent variable also takes different values. And the value of the independent one changes. Sometimes your research question tries to explain different values in the dependent variable, but the independent variables are still unknown. Examples are research questions that start with, which factors contribute or what explains. Then you have to design your research question so that the dependent variables take different values. And from there, you can search for the independent variable or variables. As you see, ensuring validity means that the technical sign of your search is not merely a mechanical affair of logical steps to follow. It is a process of careful thinking on how to design your research, so that you will indeed measure what you want to measure. The choice of research strategy is an important step of the research cycle. In this video, we discussed how to choose the strategy that fits best with your research question objective to ensure your research is valid. During the following sessions, we will dive further into the four strategies. Each strategy has its own advantages and disadvantages, which you will learn all about. Time to continue to the next video on surveys. Thank you for watching. [MUSIC]
