Research Process

Once you have found a research topic of interest and developed research questions, you are ready to begin conducting scholarly research. Through your research, you will be exploring and addressing the relationships between the variables in your hypothesis. During the course of your research, you may find information that contradicts your research statement. When this happens, you will want to try to find more information that confirms or denies the contradictory information.

You may also determine that your original research question needs to be revised. In this case, you can identify new concepts through database searches, further examine the relationship between the concepts, and review your search strategy to incorporate these new concepts.

It may also be helpful to also maintain a log of previous database search results based on different search methods and modify them accordingly. Once you have answered your initial research question, you should not stop your research before determining if the original information need has been satisfied or if additional information is needed.