Here you will be making concrete decisions about the forms, techniques and instruments required to collect your data/information. Research designs often involve choosing multiple items (mixed-methods design).
For instance, if you were planning a history paper on the impact that Gandhi had on religious conflict in pre-independence India, you would adopt a mixed-methods design:
- For 2.1, a few forms of data/information are needed: a half a dozen books and research articles from the Data collected and analyzed by researchers (mostly historians who have analyzed the particulars of that period), as well the speeches Gandhi delivered at that time, which fall under the heading of Primary Sources/Artifacts. 2.4
- The types of units are the speeches and books and articles, which fall under the category of Object/Document/Artifact. 2.5
- The sampling strategy for selecting the speeches and books and articles is non-representative, purposive sampling. 2.2
- A few data collection techniques apply: Historical-Comparative, Document Analysis and perhaps even Secondary Analysis. 2.3
- An Inventory of Information Sources instrument can be used to systematically list and categorize the sources.