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Start for freeIdentify Research Problem and Define Research Goal
At the beginning of your research, you need to ask yourself: "What do you want to investigate?" Which research field interests you and should become the topic of your paper? Once you've determined this (example: online payment systems), you need to narrow down the topic further (example: market potential of a new online payment system in Germany) and compare it with the current state of research. This way, specialized literature and the latest research results help you gain a good understanding of the topic and define the state of research. From this you can identify what might not yet have been researched or has only been researched to a limited extent. At the end of this phase, you have thus determined a personal research goal for your paper.
PS: This part is excellent for the introduction in your report.
Types of Investigation
In the individual research fields there are different states of research. Depending on how much is already known about your topic in current research, it is, in terms of definition, different types of investigations:
Exploratory investigation: Your research field is relatively little researched and you can gain initial insights. Here the goal is to conduct basic research
Descriptive investigation: Your topic already has considerable prior knowledge and you want to estimate frequencies and proportions. Here the primary goal is to obtain detailed information on a topic.
Explanatory investigation: You derive hypotheses from current research and test with your own research whether these can be confirmed or refuted.
Causal investigation: You investigate relationships between variables. Here the investigation of cause and effect is clearly in the foreground.
Dependency on the Research Method
Whether exploratory, descriptive, explanatory or causal - the type of your investigation and the current state of research on your research topic are important criteria that strongly influence your choice of research method. For a topic that has hardly been researched yet (exploratory investigation), different survey options present themselves than when examining an area where there is already extensive prior knowledge. However, you will see exactly how the distinction looks in the next chapters.
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