Black women in white male dominant industries and inclusion programs

Black Women in White Male Dominant Industries: Are Set-Aside and Inclusion Programs Really Assisting?

A research design is the plan or technique which could be adopted for a research to take place. It is a systematic method of finding answers to the questions or hypotheses for the study. It is important for the results to be reliable with maximum efficiency based on correct hypotheses formulated so that a clear direction is set, which would lead the researcher to an accurate selection of the research design that would give maximum accurate results.

Flexible Design

Flexible design of research mainly involves freedom during data collection process since one of the reasons for using this design can be that the variable data that needs to be measured cannot be taken into account quantitatively. In the given research topic, which is black women in white male dominant industries, the flexible design would not be able to measure in quantitative terms. The assistance of inclusion programs could be measured qualitatively as their quality and helpfulness could be measured in 'qualitative' terms. If this is the case, then it would be a lengthy process to analyze the results of the research.

Although the research topic could be covered in detail and in depth when such research design is used, there is a possibility that if the data is collected based on 'human experiences' then it would be more compelling as compared to that which is quantitatively measured. Moreover, with this research design, the researcher would have a clear direction of what to expect from the research and its results and with this clear vision (Atieno, 2009, p. 16), efforts are geared towards seeing a bigger picture of the scenario.

Fixed Design

Fixed design of research is mainly theory-driven and the design of the study is fixed before the actual data collection takes place. If a theory-driven strategy is adopted for the given research topic, then the results would be powerful in empirical and analytical terms (Coryn et al., 2011, p. 203). There would be better evaluation questions that would lead to better evaluated answers. Further, there would be better information that is unlikely to be collected with the help of other research designs.

The researcher need to have a clear idea beforehand of the variables and how they would operate so that the study could be conducted in a predicted manner and the results could be verified systematically. There would be specific contexts in which the variables would or would not operate; rather, it would mean that if the study does not depict what had been thought of before, then it might be the case that some mechanism had not been thought of earlier or not have been predicted correctly.

Conclusion

It does not matter what kind of research design the researcher chooses, it needs to be clear in his mind what path he wants to adopt and what expectations he has from the research. There are some hypotheses that are formulated to test the kind of questions and complexities he wants to solve. Various fields use research designs that are suitable and appropriate for the reliability of their results. In societal researches like that in the given topic here, it is imperative to take into account all the factors that would influence the hypotheses so that accurate sampling along with suitable analysis is done for trustworthy results. It would be a huge waste of time and resources if the researcher is not clear about his research topic, does not know what variables should be taken into account and what variables are dependent and independent since whole of the research would give alternate results that might not be the true representation of the theories tested and presented by other researchers of the same field; further, it is possible that the results might not be representative of the whole population.

The flexible, fixed and discourse analysis are some of the fundamental research designs that need to be selected carefully since each one of them would lead to either qualitative of quantitative research designs. Once the research design is selected, then it would be easier to carry out whole of the research in a systematic manner, depending upon the type of analysis the researcher chooses. It all comes down to only main thing; the correct selection of the research design for a carefully selected study or research topic.