What is a research scope example?
What is a research scope example?
Let’s imagine an example of a research study examining best practices for mental health. The research design centers on a survey study with a target population of college students with part-time jobs in addition to their coursework.
The researchers can focus on any number of things affecting mental health, including lifestyle factors such as sleep, socioeconomic factors such as income, and even influences further afield like the political alignment of friends and family.
Certainly, any of these things can have a profound impact on one’s mental health. But when there are so many things to examine, it’s necessary to narrow down what the research project at hand should examine.
The scope of the study can come down to any number of things, including the researchers’ interest, the current state of theoretical development on the subject of mental health, and the design of the study, particularly how the data is collected. It might even boil down to influences like geographical location, which can determine the kind of research participants involved in the study.
All of these factors can inform an explicit description of the scope, which might look like this if found in the methodology section of a paper:
“In this study, the researchers focused on surveying college students over four months, roughly the same time frame as a semester at a university in the United States. Surveys were distributed to all college students, but this paper will narrow the data analysis to those students who reported having part-time jobs. This refined lens aligns with our interest in examining work-related factors contributing to negative mental health outcomes, as established in previous studies.”
The above example of a study’s scope highlights what the researchers focused on during the study and while analyzing the data. The researchers chose to study a narrow subset of their data to generate insights most applicable to their research interests. The researchers might also analyze the proportion of students that reported having part-time jobs to give a broader description of the study body, but they clearly focus on understanding the mental health of students with part-time jobs.
Moreover, the narrow scope allows the researchers to focus on a small number of elements in the relationship between mental health and work, which allows the researchers to make deeper contributions to this specific part of the conversation around students’ mental health.
