1. State your area of interest. What is your research domain? What are you exploring through your research, or are you interested in exploring? What primary question do you want to find answers to by doing this research project?
2. List all the questions you want to find answers to, based on your current working knowledge of your topic.
3. Which aspect of practice would you like to explore?
   • The artist’s process: how you work, your methods, your approaches to writing
   • Cognition of creation: how you think about your work, while working, after working, making connections, etc.
   • Experimental creativity: introducing something new to your writing, and seeing what comes of it
   • Other (explain)
4. What approach(es) will you need to utilize in order to explore this aspect? Think in terms of actions, observations, and record-keeping; note that each approach may have associated methodologies in the literature that you can (and should) build from and reference.
   1. Describe how you will complete the creative artifact.
   2. Describe how you will observe the artist’s practice (if doing so).
   3. Describe how you will record observations that occur during the creative activity, and how you will organize that data.
5. If you are gathering information from secondary sources, have you:
   1. Identified what sources you need?
   2. Checked their availability?
6. List any issues you have had, or think you will have, in identifying and accessing these sources.
7. How are you going to identify the main themes (i.e., conclusions) that emerge from your observation notes (from step 4), contextual creative texts (that you can compare to your own), and your own creative artifact, and/or any other source that you use? In other words, how are you going to analyse the data? Textual analysis? Discourse analysis? Reflection? Be sure to identify any theoretical perspectives you will be taking – theory of mind, composition theory, structuralism, identity, etc.
8. Are you going to quantify these themes? If yes, how?

Note that it is likely your methodology will evolve over the course of your research, as all practice-based research is a process of exploration and discovery. Keep adjusting this outline as you go, and be sure to write an accurate methodology section or chapter for your essay or thesis.

Click here for a Word document version, or a PDF version of this exercise.

Information for this exercise was drawn from Kumar, Ranjit. 2011. Research Methodology: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners. London: Sage.