Stage Five: Constructing a Research Plan
Overcoming a mountain called, “Research.” Creating a research plan is a bit like climbing a mountain: every route must be planned with meticulous precision to ensure you don’t lose your way, and ultimately, sight of the end goal.
To begin with, our research plan presented a number of conflicting routes, making it hard to choose one. However, the moment we were able to accurately define the purpose of each question, together with their respective purposes, the route became much clearer.
Defining the purpose of each question
To find out what the Highsnobiety Employees were really thinking, we couldn‘t just look at them. We had to look through them. See what they actually mean when they say something. Only through investigative research of this description could we discover truth, or at least, a representative truth. That is why every question in our questionnaire was carefully refined to ensure the gathered results were as effective and useful as possible. One draft after another was designed, re-designed, and thrown away before we created the very best questions to suit our needs. After all, knowing what to include is as important knowing what not to include.
Relying on insider knowledge
While writing the questionnaire, it became apparent how difficult it is to ask people you have never met a well-founded question. A question that we asked ourselves a lot was, “Is this question even relevant?” We were trying to look at our subjects from a completely different perspective than we looked at our peers. Adam, the inside-man, was able to guide us better in this respect. We decided to rely on Adam’s inside knowledge to guide the questions, and create a questionnaire that was as relevant to a Highsnobiety employee as it possibly could be.
Choosing Unipark as our research platform
Deciding for Unipark as our research platform was a truly great decision. As it was repeatedly recommended by our professors, we were convinced of its functionality. And it performed exceptionally well. From easy-to-follow guidelines on developing a scientifically-sound questionnaire, to a structured backend and understandable EFS reports, Unipark alleviated a large amount of stress often associated with any evaluation process.
Choosing relevancy over “everything”
At the time when we closed submissions for our quantitative questionnaire, a total of 71 Highsnobiety employees successfully filled it out. Answers seemed endless. In light of this, we decided to narrow the answers down according to their relevance. Understanding the core of a biological being with a microscopic view is always challenging. We relentlessly pursued understanding the very core of our problem to deliver the most effective outcome.
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