When designing your research, you first want to ensure that you know what has already been done. The best way to know this is to read the research literature.  Search the library database for published peer reviewed research articles on your topic of interest.  See what we know, and what we don't know. Authors will make suggestions in their discussion for "future research". Take careful note of these suggestions. Build your project to focus on what we don't know. This will ensure your project makes a unique contribution.

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Develop research questions around this unique area. To do this well, you will need to operationalize your variables. This process will help you focus in on what you really want to know and set you up to collect quality data that will directly answer your research questions. This is a very important step. Take some time to get it right.

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Resist building a research project around data at hand. It is very tempting to want to go this route as it may seem to be an easier at the start. Often times, however, this turns into a more difficult project as you are trying to fit data into an idea instead of extracting the idea from the data. The latter is what research is really about. If you find that you have data that will answer your research questions, that's great! But, don't start with the data. Start with the questions. 

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When you have good research questions, and you have operationalized your variables, you are ready to determine the best way to collect data. It may be obvious from the questions, or you may need to think about it a bit. Talking it through with others is a great way to determine good methodology. Also, look at how others who have measured similar variables to those you are measuring have collected data. You can find this in the methods sections of the research articles you have reviewed. 

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Quantitative or qualitative? Consider the type of questions you have. 

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Questions that are exploring an idea, seeking to understand experiences or culture are suggestive of a qualitative design. They are often "what" and "how" questions.

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Questions that are looking at relationships, differences, or changes/impacts are suggestive of a quantitative design. These are often "does" questions or "how much/often" or "what relationship/difference" questions. 

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Here is a great video that highlights the differences between these techniques.

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