Assessing Research Topic Feasibility
An idea survives contact with reality or it does not. The source names one trade-off and four considerations, warns that ignoring any of them means disaster later, and leaves you to build the actual assessment.
Reality kicks in, and rigour starts costing something
Feasibility is the second thing that happens to a research idea. The first is enthusiasm. The source is blunt about the sequence and about what changes when the second arrives.
Two things follow. Feasibility is not a gate you pass once; it is a continuous negotiation between what would be methodologically ideal and what can actually be arranged. And the target is not maximum rigour — it is the best available trade-off for the rigour you need.
For a project manager this is familiar ground in unfamiliar clothing. It is the same structure as scoping a delivery under a fixed date and a fixed budget: the question is never whether compromise is required, only which compromises leave the outcome still worth having.
The four practical considerations
The four in one line each
Time
How long the research will take to accomplish — against a completion deadline you almost certainly do not control.
Ethical constraints
Whether there are important ethical constraints that need consideration. This one behaves as a gate, not a cost.
Cooperation
Whether you can achieve the cooperation needed to take the project to a successful conclusion — from people who owe you nothing.
Cost
How significant the costs of conducting the research are, in money and in everything else the study consumes.
The four are stated and then left. There is no scoring method, no threshold for any of them, no guidance on what counts as too long or too expensive, and no instruction on what to do when one of them fails. The only stated consequence of skipping the exercise is that failure to consider any of these factors can mean disaster later.
Time: fixed before you start, and always underestimated
For a part-time researcher, elapsed time is usually the binding constraint and it is set before the topic is chosen. The teaching source acknowledges this directly when it asks whether the problems attached to an idea are substantial enough to stop a research project, or to substantially delay one — noting in the same breath that you have restricted time to complete the project in.
It supplies one usable planning rule, though it appears at the design step rather than here: plan half of your time for doing the research itself and the other half for writing and rewriting. Applied at feasibility assessment, that halves the time available for collection and analysis before you have made a single design decision.
WHERE ELAPSED TIME ACTUALLY GOES IN A PART-TIME STUDY
| Consumer of time | Why it is routinely underestimated |
|---|---|
| Ethics clearance | It behaves like a queue rather than a task — the supplied source does not say who grants clearance or how long it takes, and that unknown duration is not compressible by working harder |
| Negotiating access | Depends on other people's calendars and priorities, and often has to be renegotiated when a sponsor changes |
| Recruitment and scheduling | Participants agree quickly and appear slowly; a diary is a weaker commitment than a signature |
| Transcription and data preparation | Almost never planned; consistently larger than the collection it follows |
| Writing and rewriting | The source's own allocation is half the total, and it is the half that gets borrowed against |
The rows are a synthesis for planning purposes. The source names time as a consideration and supplies the half-and-half allocation rule; it does not break time down this way.
Ethical constraints behave as a gate, not a cost
The second consideration is different in kind from the other three and the difference matters. Time, cooperation and cost are quantities you trade against each other. An ethical constraint is not tradeable: a design that cannot be approved does not become approvable by allowing more months or more money.
The supplied source reduces the substantive treatment to three screening questions — whether the project requires access to confidential or personal information, whether the questions are appropriate and respectful of cultural norms, and whether the collection methods are unbiased and ethical — and then defers the subject to a later topic that is not part of the supplied material. The full position, including the size of that deferral, is set out in Step 6: Seeking Ethics Clearance.
At feasibility stage the three questions do real work anyway, because they identify designs that will be slow or impossible before you are attached to them. A study of a workforce you supervise, a study touching personal or health information, or a study whose questions probe conduct rather than practice will each carry a heavier clearance burden than a study of documents and process data.
Cooperation is the leg most often assumed
The source's wording is precise: can you achieve the needed cooperation to take the project to its successful conclusion. Not cooperation to start — cooperation sustained to the end, which is a longer and less reliable commitment.
Two other statements in the same material sharpen this. One is a question the source puts at the point of deciding what data you need: what authority do I need to collect this data or information. The other is its observation about social science research generally — that people are aware of research being conducted on them, and that this awareness is a property of the research situation rather than a nuisance in it. See Social Science Research: Why People Are Harder to Study.
Researching your own organisation makes this leg look easy and is exactly where it fails. Informal agreement from a colleague is not organisational approval; a supportive sponsor is not a guarantee that their successor will be; and permission to talk to people is not permission to publish what they say.
What cooperation actually requires, tested one item at a time
- Named individuals who have agreed, not a category of people who might
- Approval from whoever can actually grant it, obtained in writing
- Agreement that survives a change of sponsor, restructure or reprioritisation
- Time released for participants, not merely permitted
- Access to the records and systems your design depends on, confirmed by whoever controls them
- Clearance to publish or submit findings that may be unwelcome
Cost, in money and in everything else
The source asks how significant the costs of conducting the research are and stops there. It names no cost categories and gives no figures, so none are supplied here.
What is worth stating is that the money cost of a practitioner study is usually small and rarely the thing that stops it. The costs that stop studies are the ones with no invoice attached.
Costs with an invoice
- Transcription of recorded material
- Survey platform or analysis software licences
- Access to publications outside your institution's subscriptions
- Travel to distributed or remote sites
- Incentives or reimbursement for participants, where permitted
Costs without one
- Participants' working time, charged to somebody's budget as a real cost
- Your own leave, evenings and weekends over the whole period
- Goodwill spent on colleagues, which is finite and non-renewable
- Sponsor attention, competing with delivery pressures
- The opportunity cost of the study you did not do instead
The second column is a synthesis rather than source content. It is included because it is where practitioner studies actually run out of room: the design is affordable in cash and unaffordable in everything else.
An assessment you can run in an hour
The four considerations become usable when each is turned into a question with a piece of evidence attached. Run the table below against a candidate topic before you commit to it, and write the evidence column rather than reasoning about it in your head.
THE FOUR-LEG FEASIBILITY ASSESSMENT
| Leg | The question to answer | Evidence that answers it | Fail signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Can the whole sequence fit the available period, with half of it left for writing? | A dated sequence from clearance to submission, on a calendar | Collection starts in the second half of the period |
| Ethics | Which of the screening questions does this design trip, and what does clearance require? | The three screening questions answered in writing, and a clearance timetable obtained | You cannot say what clearance requires or how long it takes |
| Cooperation | Who must agree, and have they, in a form that survives their departure? | Named approvers, written agreement, a stated position on publication | The plan relies on people described by their role rather than their name |
| Cost | What does this consume in money, in participants' time and in goodwill? | A short list under both headings, with the participant hours totalled | The total participant hours have never been added up |
Structure and content are a synthesis built from the source's four headings. The source names the considerations and supplies no assessment method.
What to do when a leg fails
Feasibility and scope are the same conversation approached from opposite ends, which is why the commonest remedy above is to narrow. That mechanism has its own page — see Narrowing and Scoping a Research Topic. Where the remedy is a different topic altogether, start again from Where Research Topics Come From.
What to carry forward
- Feasibility is a search for the best available trade-off between rigour and practicality, not a search for ideal conditions.
- Four legs decide it: time, ethical constraints, cooperation and cost.
- Rigour is paid for by other people — in constrained discretion and consumed time — so cost the design in their currency, not yours.
- Ethics is a gate. A design that cannot be cleared does not become clearable with more time or money.
- Cooperation means named people, written agreement and a position on publication — not a supportive conversation.
- The source supplies no thresholds or scoring; build the assessment yourself and write down the evidence.
- When one leg fails, narrow the scope. When two fail, change the topic.
Frequently asked questions
What are the four practical considerations in the source?
How long the research will take to accomplish; whether there are important ethical constraints needing consideration; whether you can achieve the cooperation needed to take the project to a successful conclusion; and how significant the costs of conducting the research are. The source adds that failure to consider any of these can mean disaster later, and gives no thresholds for any of them.
What does the rigour-versus-practicality trade-off actually mean in practice?
That doing a study well from a scientific point of view forces you to do things you would not do normally — controlling an implementation more tightly, or asking participants questions you would otherwise not ask. Since unlimited resources and full control seldom exist, the source's position is that researchers look for the best trade-offs available to reach the rigour they need.
How long should I allow for the writing?
The source recommends planning half your total time for doing the research and the other half for writing and rewriting. It offers this at the research design step rather than as part of the feasibility considerations, but applying it at feasibility is the point: it halves the time available for collection before any design decision is made.
Is researching my own organisation easier or harder?
Easier on access and harder on almost everything else. Informal agreement is not organisational approval, permission to talk to people is not permission to publish, and studying people you have authority over raises the ethical stakes considerably. Treat cooperation as the leg to prove rather than the one you can assume.
What should I do if my topic fails on one of the four?
The source does not say, so this is guidance rather than source content. In practice: narrow the scope if time fails, change the design if ethics fails, secure written agreement before designing if cooperation is uncertain, and reduce the instrument or sample if participant time is the constraint. If two legs fail, change the topic.
References and source attribution
- Trochim, W. M. K. 2006, Research Methods Knowledge Base (http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/probform.php) — the source of the feasibility passage and the four practical considerations reproduced in the supplied teaching material.
- O'Leary, Z. 2017, The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project, 3rd ed., Sage Publications, London.
- Naoum, S. G. 2013, Dissertation Research & Writing for Construction Students, 3rd ed., Routledge — cited in the supplied source as the reading on topic selection.
- Bryman, A. 2016, Social Research Methods, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- The supplied teaching source: consolidated week 3 teaching notes and slide material on developing a research topic, used here as the basis for all statements attributed to "the source".
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- Run my research topic through the four feasibility legs and tell me which one is weakest.
- Build me a dated sequence from ethics clearance to submission for a nine-month study.
- What written agreements should I obtain before collecting data inside my own organisation?
- Help me narrow a topic that fails on time but is otherwise sound.
- List the non-cash costs of a survey and interview study of project teams.