This book addresses these issues by providing a guide to major design decisions, such as deciding a paradigm, stating a purpose for the study, identifying the research questions and hypotheses, using theory, and defining and stating the significance of the study. Each chapter is organized to first present the principles about composing and writing qualitative and quantitative approaches followed by specific examples from journal articles and dissertations from a variety of fields within the social and human sciences. Each chapter concludes with writing exercises that relate back to these formats so that the reader can end the book with a written plan for a scholarly study. Research Design is aimed at upper division to graduate level research methods courses that are taught to prepare students to plan and write up independent research studies.