Research is both a science and art. It is a science because the researcher is guided with the well established principles and guidelines. It is also an art because the researcher needs to be creative in determining the appropriateness of the methodology which is suitable to the problem being investigated and it is considered a cycle. It starts with a question and supposedly ends with an answer. However, the answer by one researcher may be the basis of the problem for another researcher. Research involves an electric blending of an enormous range of skills and activities. To be a good social researcher, you have to be able to work well with a wide variety of people, understand the subject that you are studying, be stay on track and on schedule, speak and write persuasively, on and on.
Most research projects share the same general structure. The research process usually starts with a broad area of interest, the initial problem that the researcher wishes to study. For instance, the researcher could be interested in how to use computers to improve the performance of students in mathematics. But this initial interest is far too broad to study in any single research project. The researcher has to narrow the question down to one that can reasonably be suited in a research project. This might involve formulating a hypothesis or a focus question. For instance, the researcher might hypothesize that a particular method of computer instruction in math will improve the ability of elementary school students in a specific district.
Once the basic data is collected, the researcher begins to try to understand it, usually by analyzing it in a variety of ways. Even for a single hypothesis there are number of analyses a researcher might typically conduct. At this point, the researcher begins to formulate some initial conclusions about what happened as a result of the computerized math program. Finally, the researcher often will attempt to address the original broad question of interest by generalizing from the results of this specific study to other related situations.