Research design is your plan for answering your research question, including the purpose, aim, data collection methods, data management, data analysis, and more.
Research methods is the specific strategy you will implement to implement the data collection, including the sample, time frame, collection process, and more.
Either way, you must start with a research question. The research question and your reason for asking that question (your research goal) is ultimately what helps you lay out your plan and select your methods.
There are many ways to classify research approaches. At the broadest level there is:
Gathers data about people's experiences, perceptions, emotions, behaviors and the meanings that people attach to them. The questions and procedures often emerge from the research situation and process, with data analysis inductively building themes that the researcher uses to propose a theory.
A deductive approach for testing theories (using hypotheses) through an examination of the relationship between variables. Variables are operationalized (made measurable) so that numeric data can be statistically evaluated.
An approach that involves collecting both qualitative and quantitative data and integrating both in the resulting analysis.
Each of these approaches involved using different data collection techniques including surveys, interviews, observation, document analysis, and experiments.
A Practical Approach to Analyzing Healthcare Data
by
Susan E. White; American Health Information Management Association Staff (Contribution by)
A Practical Approach to Analyzing Healthcare Data, Third Edition, offers guidance to healthcare professionals and health information management (HIM) students on how to best analyze, categorize, and manage the data that they encounter in an industry becoming ever more dependent on these tasks. With expanded and reorganized content on statistical analysis techniques, and new content on value-based purchasing (VBP) analytics and risk adjustment, this text applies broader principles of data evaluation specifically to the field of HIM. Updated and augmented online resources give professionals and students access to actual data sets and data analysis tools to use in their studies, and an Analysis in Practice section added to each chapter facilitates hands-on experience working with data.