4.8 Research Design

The design = the research's architecture — the plan that connects the question to the conclusion through the method. The components' map: the purpose (exploratory/descriptive/ explanatory — Unit 1's types), the strategy (the survey, the case study, the experiment, the doctrinal analysis), the sampling plan (Unit 3.1), the instruments (Unit 3.2–3.6), the data-analysis plan (Unit 5), and the time-and-resources' schedule. The classic designs in legalresearch: the cross-sectional (the one-time survey); the longitudinal (the docket's decade — the delay's measurement); the case-study design (the one court's depth); the comparativedesign (the two districts, the two statutes' eras); the before-and-after (the reform's impact — the pre-2074 vs post-2074 procedure); the experimental/quasi (rare in law — the clinic's randomised-advice study as the frontier). The design's tests: the validity (the conclusion's truth — internal: the causal confidence; external: the generalisation's reach) and the reliability (the replication's stability — another researcher, same findings); the errors' design (the sampling bias, the measurement error, the confounders — designed against, honestly reported).