Other research designs

There are many different ways to research health topics. Understanding Health Research focuses on assisting you in critically reviewing the most commonplace types of health research, but if the research you are interested in uses a more unusual method, you may find a brief explanation of it here.

Read the abstract of the paper and decide whether the methods used are similar to any of these research designs:

Historical research: a type of research that examines past events or to arrive at an account of what has happened in the past.

Case series: a descriptive medical research study that tracks patients with a known exposure who have been given a similar treatment, or examines their medical records for exposure and outcome.

Case studies: Case studies use a range of methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to gain in-depth understandings of a person, activity or outcome.

Modelling Studies: a type of research used in a wide variety of areas of science and health as a way to simulate some part of the world to help us understand how it is likely to change. These models can simulate physical systems, such as the way that the human body will react to a drug, or social systems, such as how an infectious disease is likely to spread throughout a population.

Economic evaluations: a tool used to work out the value of specific healthcare treatments or cost of illnesses. Rather than purely judging the value of a treatment by its medical effectiveness, economic evaluations take into account the costs of using them.

Oral history: a type of research used to find out how people recall their experiences of an event or period of history. Researchers use interviews to collect oral histories. The interviews tend be quite unstructured, which means that the researcher has a list of topics they want to discuss, but the person being interviewed has more control over what they talk about.

Consultative methods: a set of tools used to reach consensus on an issue. For example, a consultative process might be used to develop procedures for how to manage an outbreak of a highly infectious disease. Often also referred to as ‘engagement’ or ‘participatory’ research.