Original research — also called primary research — involves generating new data or working directly with primary sources rather than relying exclusively on what other scholars have already published. While most undergraduate research papers at U.S. colleges and universities are built primarily on secondary sources (peer-reviewed articles, books, and reports), many courses require or encourage students to conduct some form of original inquiry: interviewing an expert, surveying a population, analyzing archival documents, observing a setting, or running an experiment. Original research adds authority and specificity to a paper that secondary sources alone cannot provide, because the student is producing evidence rather than interpreting evidence that someone else produced. This guide, part of iResearchNet’s How to Do Research series, covers the major forms of original research available to undergraduate and graduate students, the ethical requirements that govern human-subjects research at U.S. institutions, and the practical steps involved in designing, conducting, and reporting primary research.
Types of Original Research
Original research takes different forms depending on the discipline, the research question, and the type of evidence the question demands. The main categories are interviews, surveys, experiments, observational fieldwork, and archival or document analysis. Some projects combine multiple methods — a mixed-methods approach that draws on both quantitative and qualitative data — while others use a single method suited to the research question.
The choice of method should follow from the research question, not the other way around. A question about how social workers in a particular city experience burnout calls for qualitative methods — interviews, focus groups, or observational fieldwork — that capture individual perspectives and lived experience. A question about whether a specific intervention reduces burnout rates calls for quantitative methods — a survey with validated scales, or an experimental design with treatment and control groups — that produce measurable, comparable data. Students should discuss their proposed methodology with their instructor before beginning data collection, both to confirm that the method fits the question and to identify any institutional requirements (such as IRB review) that must be satisfied first.
Ethical Requirements and Institutional Review
Any original research that involves human participants — interviews, surveys, experiments, focus groups, or observations of identifiable individuals — is subject to ethical oversight at U.S. colleges and universities. The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, establishes the federal regulations governing human-subjects research, and every institution that receives federal funding is required to maintain an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that reviews research protocols for compliance with these regulations.
The scope of IRB review varies. Many classroom-based research projects — particularly surveys or interviews conducted as part of a course assignment, with no intent to publish or generalize the findings — qualify for exemption from full IRB review. However, the determination of whether a project is exempt is made by the IRB itself, not by the student or the instructor. Students planning original research that involves human participants should consult their instructor and their institution’s IRB office early in the planning process to determine what level of review, if any, is required. Failing to obtain necessary IRB approval before beginning data collection can result in the data being unusable — a serious setback that is entirely preventable with advance planning.
The core ethical principles governing human-subjects research are informed consent (participants must understand what the research involves and agree to participate voluntarily), minimization of risk (the research should not expose participants to harm that outweighs its potential benefits), confidentiality (participants’ identifiable information must be protected), and the right to withdraw (participants may stop participating at any time without penalty). These principles apply regardless of whether formal IRB review is required. Students who conduct interviews or surveys without a formal protocol should still obtain participants’ informed consent, protect their privacy, and represent their responses accurately and fairly.
Conducting Interviews
Interviews allow students to collect detailed, firsthand information from individuals who have direct knowledge of the topic under investigation. An interview with a practicing clinician, a policy maker, a community organizer, or an academic specialist can provide perspectives, examples, and insights that published literature does not capture. Including quotations from knowledgeable sources adds authority and immediacy to a research paper — provided the interviews are conducted professionally and the interviewees’ views are represented accurately.
Planning and Requesting Interviews
Identifying appropriate interviewees requires the same judgment that governs source selection in secondary research: the person should have relevant expertise, professional experience, or direct involvement with the topic. Faculty members at the student’s own institution are often willing to be interviewed, as are professionals in community organizations, government agencies, and nonprofit groups. Students should request interviews well in advance of their deadline, explain the purpose and scope of the project, estimate the time commitment involved, and offer the interviewee a choice of format — in person, by phone, or by video call.
A professional request — sent by email, with the student’s full name, course, institution, research topic, and a brief explanation of why the person’s expertise is relevant — significantly increases the likelihood of a positive response. Students should prepare a list of focused, open-ended questions before the interview and share them with the interviewee in advance when possible. Preparation demonstrates respect for the interviewee’s time and produces more substantive responses than improvised questioning.
Conducting and Recording Interviews
During the interview, the student’s primary task is to listen. Open-ended questions (“How has your approach to [topic] changed over the past decade?”) produce richer, more detailed responses than closed questions (“Do you think [topic] is important?”). Follow-up questions — “Can you give me an example of that?” or “What happened next?” — draw out the specifics that make interview data valuable. Students should resist the impulse to interrupt, to argue with the interviewee’s views, or to rush through the question list.
Recording the interview — with the interviewee’s explicit permission, obtained before recording begins — ensures accuracy when incorporating quotations into the paper. Both audio and video recording are acceptable; the choice depends on the interviewee’s preference and the interview’s format. If recording is not possible, detailed written notes taken during the interview, supplemented by additional notes written immediately afterward while the conversation is fresh, serve as the record. All quotations attributed to an interviewee in the final paper must accurately reflect what the person said, and the context in which they said it should not be distorted.
Conducting Surveys
Surveys collect standardized data from a group of respondents, allowing the researcher to identify patterns, measure attitudes, and draw quantitative conclusions. A well-designed survey can strengthen a research paper by providing original empirical evidence that directly addresses the research question — “68 percent of respondents reported that they had experienced food insecurity at least once during the academic year” carries a different kind of persuasive weight than a citation of someone else’s study reporting a similar finding.
Designing the Survey
Survey design requires careful attention to question wording, response options, and overall structure. Questions should be specific, unambiguous, and neutral — they should not lead the respondent toward a particular answer. The question “Don’t you agree that tuition is too high?” is leading; “How would you rate the affordability of tuition at your institution?” is neutral. Response formats include Likert scales (strongly agree to strongly disagree), multiple choice, ranking, and open-ended comment fields. Each format serves a different analytical purpose: Likert scales measure intensity of agreement, multiple choice captures categorical preferences, rankings establish relative priorities, and open-ended responses capture perspectives that predetermined options might miss.
Modern survey tools — Qualtrics (available through many universities at no cost to students), Google Forms, and SurveyMonkey — provide templates, skip-logic functionality, and built-in data analysis that make survey creation and distribution accessible to students without specialized training. Most of these platforms also generate exportable datasets that can be analyzed in spreadsheet software or statistical packages.
Sampling and Distribution
The validity of survey findings depends on who responds. A survey of fifteen friends does not represent the attitudes of an entire student body. While true random sampling is rarely feasible for a course-based research project, students should aim for a sample that is as representative as possible of the population they claim to describe. Distributing the survey through multiple channels — email lists, social media, and in-person recruitment — helps reach respondents from different demographic and social groups. Reporting the sample size, the response rate, and any demographic characteristics of the respondents (age range, gender distribution, academic level) allows readers to assess the generalizability of the findings.
Analyzing and Reporting Results
Survey data should be analyzed systematically and reported transparently. Descriptive statistics — frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations — summarize the patterns in the data. Cross-tabulations reveal whether responses differ across demographic groups. Students should present their findings in tables or charts where appropriate and should distinguish between what the data shows and what the data suggests — a 60 percent agreement rate on a question is a finding; the explanation for that rate is an interpretation that requires supporting evidence.
The American Psychological Association and the American Statistical Association both publish guidelines on survey methodology and statistical reporting that students conducting survey-based research should consult. The APA’s guidelines are particularly relevant for students in the social sciences and health fields, where survey research is common and where APA formatting standards govern how results are presented.
Conducting Experiments
Experimental research involves manipulating one or more variables under controlled conditions and measuring the effect on an outcome variable. Experiments are the standard methodology in the natural sciences and are common in psychology, education, and health sciences. Undergraduate students most frequently encounter experimental research in laboratory courses, where the experiment is structured by the instructor, and in independent research projects or senior theses, where the student designs the experiment.
The essential structure of an experiment includes a hypothesis (a testable prediction about the relationship between variables), an independent variable (the factor the researcher manipulates), a dependent variable (the outcome the researcher measures), and a control condition (a comparison group that does not receive the manipulation). Rigorous experiments also include randomization (assigning participants or specimens to conditions randomly to reduce bias) and replication (repeating the experiment to confirm that the results are consistent).
Students conducting experiments must document their procedures with enough detail that another researcher could replicate the study. This documentation — which appears in the Methods section of the final paper — should specify the materials and equipment used, the step-by-step procedure followed, the characteristics of any participants or specimens, and the statistical tests applied to the data. Complete methodological transparency is a requirement of scientific research, and instructors evaluate it as a core component of experimental research papers.
Observational Research and Fieldwork
Observational research involves systematically watching, recording, and analyzing behavior or events in their natural settings. This method is common in sociology, anthropology, education, social work, and some areas of psychology and public health. Unlike experiments, which manipulate conditions, observational research studies phenomena as they occur without intervention.
Observational methods range from highly structured (using predetermined coding schemes to count specific behaviors at timed intervals) to unstructured (writing detailed field notes that capture everything the observer witnesses during a session). Participant observation — in which the researcher participates in the setting while observing it — is a hallmark of ethnographic research in anthropology and sociology. Non-participant observation — in which the researcher observes without participating — is more common in education and clinical settings.
Regardless of the approach, observational research requires systematic documentation. Field notes should record what was observed, when and where it was observed, who was present, and what the observer’s own reactions and interpretations were. Separating observation (what actually happened) from interpretation (what the observer thinks it means) is a discipline that students must practice deliberately, as the tendency to merge the two is strong and can compromise the data’s integrity.
Archival and Document Analysis
Archival research involves working directly with primary documents — letters, diaries, government records, organizational files, court transcripts, photographs, maps, and other materials — housed in libraries, archives, government repositories, and digital collections. This method is standard in history and is common in political science, legal studies, literary criticism, and area studies. Many U.S. university libraries maintain special collections that house unique primary materials, and major digital archives — including the Library of Congress Digital Collections, the National Archives, and the HathiTrust Digital Library — provide remote access to millions of digitized documents.
Content analysis — a related method that applies systematic coding procedures to texts, media, or other communicative materials — is used across the social sciences to analyze patterns in published content. A student might conduct a content analysis of newspaper coverage of immigration policy, coding articles by theme, source type, and framing to identify patterns over time. Content analysis bridges qualitative and quantitative approaches: the coding process is interpretive, but the results can be summarized statistically.
Integrating Original Research into Your Paper
Original research appears in a research paper alongside secondary sources, not instead of them. The student’s primary data — interview quotations, survey results, experimental findings, observational notes, or archival evidence — provides firsthand evidence that supports, complicates, or extends the arguments found in published scholarship. A paper that reports only the student’s own data without situating it within the existing literature lacks the scholarly context that gives the findings meaning. A paper that relies only on secondary sources when original data is available (and feasible) misses an opportunity to contribute something that no other paper contains.
When reporting original research, transparency about methods and limitations is essential. The paper should explain how the data was collected, from whom, over what time period, and with what limitations. A survey with a 15 percent response rate should acknowledge that limitation. An interview with a single expert should not be presented as representative of an entire profession’s views. An experiment conducted with a small sample should note the constraints on generalizability. Honest reporting of limitations does not weaken a paper — it demonstrates the methodological awareness that instructors and reviewers look for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need IRB approval for a class project?
It depends on the project and the institution. Many class-based surveys and interviews qualify for exemption from full IRB review, but the determination must be made by the IRB, not by the student. Some institutions require all student research involving human participants to be registered with the IRB, even if the project is ultimately exempt. Consulting the instructor and the IRB office at the beginning of the project is the safest approach and prevents the risk of collecting data that cannot be used.
How many people should I interview or survey?
For interviews, quality matters more than quantity. Three to five carefully selected interviewees with direct expertise can provide more valuable data than a dozen interviews with people who have only tangential knowledge. For surveys, larger samples produce more reliable results, but the minimum depends on the population being studied and the precision required. For a course-based research paper, a sample of 30 to 50 respondents is often sufficient to identify meaningful patterns, though the student should report the sample size and acknowledge its limitations.
Can I use my own experience as original research?
Personal experience can provide motivation for a research question and can sometimes serve as anecdotal context, but it does not constitute research in the academic sense. The distinction is between systematic, documented inquiry that others can evaluate and replicate, and individual recollection that reflects one person’s perspective. Instructors generally expect original research to involve methods — interviews, surveys, experiments, observations, or document analysis — that produce data beyond the student’s own experience.
How do I cite my own interviews and surveys?
Citation formats for original research vary by style. In APA style, personal communications (including interviews) are cited in the text but do not appear in the reference list, because readers cannot retrieve them. In Chicago style, interviews may be cited in footnotes or endnotes with the interviewee’s name, the interview format, and the date. Survey data collected by the student is typically described in the Methods section of the paper rather than cited as a separate source. The instructor’s preferred citation style should govern these decisions.
Related Pages
- How to Do Research — Overview of research methods and discipline-specific guides
- How to Do Library Research — Using catalogs, databases, and librarian expertise
- How to Do Online Research — Evaluating and using internet sources for academic papers
- How to Take Notes — Note-taking systems for organizing research
- How to Write a Proposal for a Research Paper — Formalizing your research plan