Conducting Follow-Up Research

You’ve conducted your study and reported and disseminated your findings. What’s next? That depends on what you find, and if you’re interested in exploring the topic further. Completing one research study will rarely answer every question you have about a topic. In fact, the findings you uncover  might reveal unexpected patterns or raise new issues that you hadn’t considered before. These surprises can spark curiosity and lead to follow-up studies that dig deeper into a specific topic, test your results in a different setting, or explore related ideas. Every study design has strengths and limitations – things it reveals and things it doesn’t. Designing a follow-up study using a different study design can confirm your previous findings and help you see the issue you are studying from a new angle. Each research study is a stepping stone that helps build a larger body of knowledge over time!

Your completed study also gives you valuable experience and insight that can shape how you approach future research. Maybe you discovered a more effective way to collect data, or realized that a certain method didn’t work as well as you’d hoped. These lessons can help you design stronger, more focused studies in the future. Sharing your work with others through presentations, posters, or publications can also lead to collaboration opportunities. Other students, faculty members, or professionals might be interested in working with you to expand on your findings or apply them in new contexts.

Students in Research

If you are at all interested in learning more about research, it is highly recommended that you seek out an opportunity to participate on a research team. If you’re hoping to go to graduate school, this advice is even more important, but even if you don’t think you’ll continue doing research after you graduate, having some hands-on research experience will give you lasting knowledge and skills that will benefit you.

Don’t believe us yet? Maybe this will help. Read 10 Benefits of Student Participation in Undergraduate Social Work Research (and note that these benefits apply to other social sciences too!).

So how do you go about getting involved in research? Mainly, it’s just a matter of asking. Talk to your professors and ask if they have research projects going on or know of others who do. Pay attention to current research going on around you and reach out to faculty whose work sounds interesting to you. Some professors will have you join on a project they already have going, and others will simply support you in pursuing your own ideas. So if you’re interested in actually doing the research you proposed for this class, for example, ask a professor if they’d support you in it (and you can share your proposal with them to show how much you’ve already thought through!)

Conclusion

Research studies build on one another to help us better understand complex issues—no single study can answer everything. Each study contributes a small piece to a much larger puzzle, offering new insights, confirming past findings, or challenging existing ideas. When researchers share their results and others build on them, knowledge grows in a thoughtful, evidence-based way. Over time, the accumulation of many well-designed studies helps reveal patterns, deepen our understanding, and guide meaningful changes in practice, policy, or theory. It’s through this collective effort that research truly makes an impact.