Market Research: Foundations to Practice · Research Design: Choosing the Right Method
Budgeting and Timeline Realities
Research budgets and timelines are frequently set before the method is even chosen, which backs the design into compromises that should have been made deliberately. This chapter covers how to sequence this correctly.
Research projects generally trade off across three dimensions: speed, cost, and rigor, and improving one typically requires sacrificing at least one of the other two; a study that must be both extremely fast and extremely cheap will generally need to sacrifice some degree of methodological rigor, such as a smaller sample size or a less representative recruitment method, to fit those constraints.
Key Takeaways
- Research trades off across speed, cost, and rigor; improving one dimension typically requires sacrificing at least one of the others.
- Setting budget or timeline before choosing a method forces the method to bend around an arbitrary constraint rather than the actual research need.
- Rigor should be right-sized to decision stakes: low-stakes, reversible decisions can justify a lighter study; high-stakes, hard-to-reverse ones justify more rigor.
- When constraints can't flex, researchers should explicitly communicate the resulting methodological compromise rather than silently delivering a weaker study.