An Alternative to the Research Onion

In Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, J. W. Creswell and J. D. Creswell present one of the most widely used accounts of how to design a study. Having worked through this text closely — using it to guide my own research and to critique the work of other academics — I have a great deal to say about it, and almost all of it is positive.

I would genuinely encourage you to study the book carefully, and perhaps to buy a copy. If you are an undergraduate, postgraduate, independent researcher, or academic in the social sciences, you have probably come across it already. If not, now is a good time to take a look.

The book is rich and wide-ranging. It shows how research problems can be developed systematically; discusses ethical issues; examines purpose statements, research questions, and hypotheses; offers rigorous definitions of the various design processes, approaches, and knowledge claims; and guides the researcher, in valuable detail, towards methodologically sound work.

One especially notable feature is the framework it presents for designing a study. After reading about it, I began to compare it with the “Research Onion” of Saunders et al. (2011), which we cover in a separate article.

There are many similarities and differences between the two frameworks, and a full comparison is beyond the scope of this article. The point I want to make is simpler: if you are looking for an alternative to the Research Onion, for whatever reason, Creswell and Creswell’s framework is a reasonable choice. To show why, here is a brief introduction.

Elements of Inquiry in Creswell and Creswell’s Framework

Unlike the Research Onion, Creswell and Creswell’s framework is divided into three parts: (i) elements of inquiry; (ii) approaches to research; and (iii) the design process. Let’s work through the first of these — and I would encourage you to turn to the text itself for the other two. Better still, learn the whole framework and apply it in your next project.

The first thing to consider under “elements of inquiry” is alternative knowledge claims. Here the researcher must think about the philosophical assumptions — axiological, ontological, and epistemological — that will underpin the research process. Comprehensive introductions to research philosophy are available in any university library, and the topic richly rewards deeper study.

Next come strategies of inquiry, which give specific direction to the procedures used in a study. Examples include experiments and surveys (the quantitative approach); ethnography, grounded theory, case studies, and phenomenological research (the qualitative approach); and sequential, concurrent, and transformative procedures (the mixed-methods approach).

The final element is methods — the broad set of techniques and procedures for data collection and analysis used in the design-process part of the framework. It appears in the first part because, according to Creswell and Creswell, it is useful to weigh the full range of possibilities before embarking on the practical work of designing the study itself.

References

Creswell, J. W. and Creswell, J. D. (2018) Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 5th edn. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications.

Saunders, M., Lewis, P., and Thornhill, A. (2011) Research Methods for Business Students. 5th edn. Harlow: Pearson.