Key concepts: research frames

List of key concepts for understanding the basic research framses used in English studies.

Basic research frames

Concept	Explanation
action research	research that is undertaken by practitioners (e.g. teachers, social workers, nurses or doctors) for the purpose of helping to develop their practice; it is usually done at the same time as performing that practice; the central is change and the emphasis is on problem-solving
case study	in-depth research into one case or a small set of cases, e.g. a child, a hospital ward, an event; the aim is to gain a rich, detailed understanding by examining aspects of the case in detail
experiment	research used to find out whether or to what extent one thing causes another to happen; trying to see if x causes y
informed consent	the process of telling potential research particpants about the key elements of a research study and what their participation will involve; one of the central components of the ethical conduct of research with human subjects
introspection	relying on one’s own intuition as a source of data about the nature of their language; e.g. these intuitions often take the form of judgements about whether a given sentence is grammatical in your language; relying solely on introspection is not considered an appropriate approach in a scientific research
observation	one of the most important ways of collecting data in social research; watching carefully to systematically look for particular kinds of behaviour
reliability	how consistently a method measures something; if the same result can be consistently achieved by using the same methods under the same circumstances, the measurement is considered reliable.
replicability	hypothesis or claims based on the findings of scientific investigations are verified by attempts to replicate them by repeating the procedure of the original investigation
qualitative analysis	an analysis that does not rely on numeric data; e.g. if you look at a word in a concordance and analyse its usage based on your own understanding of the examples you have seen, this is a qualitative analysis; the best corpus analyses are both qualitative and quantitative
validity	how accurately a method measures what it isintended to measure; if research has high validity,that means it produces results that correspond toreal properties, characteristics, and variations inthe physical or social world