ABSTRACT
Research is in the nature of sailing off to chart unexplored seas or, more concretely, trudging off to map unexplored territories. Research design is about aiming in the right direction, getting your bearings right (from previous studies) and making sure you are adequately equipped to get there and back. Methods texts explain how to build a ship, but it is navigators who take ships to sea and sail them. Columbus set sail to find the western route to the East Indies and came across the West Indies and America instead. Research designs that fail in their original intentions are not always so lucky, but it helps if one is clear that the original plan made sense, can offer some reasons on why it went awry and describes what was discovered instead. However, research projects are more likely to fail from being over ambitious or poorly designed in the first place.
