Research design for technical communications

The authors consider how one can design research studies so that they meet the needs of the technical communications community and serve as the basis of a unified theory. This research design involves the following steps: establish hypotheses to clearly identify what it is that you are trying to find out; determine how you can test those hypotheses and only those hypotheses and not be distracted by extraneous factors; clearly identify what extraneous factors might affect the results you get; identify what you expect to find if the hypothesis holds, and identify what else might produce the same results; find ways to discriminate between causes, and design a research strategy that controls these extraneous factors; collect your data and submit it to rigorous analysis; compare these results to the hypotheses and identify your level of confidence in accepting or rejecting any or all of the hypotheses; and, finally, identify the impact of your current findings and their implications for further research