Categories of Research Methods and Types of Research Results Illustrated with a Continuous Project
Ella Roubtsova · 2019
Research projects are often continuous, they are initiated by one researcher and continued by another. Eachresearcher needs to understand the continuous project and his part in it. This part we call a mini project.Explanation of research methods and projects results in literature does not help in understanding continuousresearch projects. Descriptions of research methods are often full of details and do not show relations betweenprojects supported by different research methods. In this paper, we put all research methods into three categoriesand define two types of results. We suggest defining a mini project by a research method category andits result type. From such mini projects we build continuous projects. This way of structuring is illustratedwith a continuous project investigating a view on changes of enterprise architecture. The relations of miniprojects of different categories are generalized in a guidance for researchers, supervisors and reviewers.