The possible motives for doing research may be either one or more of the following:

• Desire to get a research degree along with its consequential benefits
• Desire to face the challenge in solving the unsolved problems, i.e., concern over practical problems initiates research
• Desire to get intellectual joy of doing some creative work
• Desire to be of service to society
• Desire to get respectability
• Curiosity about unknown
• Desire to understand the cause and effect of wide spread social problems
• Appearance of novel and unanticipated situations
• Desire to discover new and test old scientific procedure as an efficient way to gain useful and fundamental knowledge.

However, this is not an exhaustive list of factors motivating people to undertake research studies. Many more factors such as directives of government, employment conditions, curiosity about new things, desire to understand causal relationships, social thinking and awakening, and the like may as well motivate (or at times compel) people to perform research operations.

Whatever may be the types of research works and studies, one thing that is important is that they all meet on the common ground of scientific method employed by them. One expects scientific research to satisfy the following criteria:

• The purpose of the research should be clearly defined and common concepts be used.
• The research procedure used should be described in sufficient detail to permit another researcher to repeat the research for further advancement, keeping the continuity of what has already been attained.
• The procedural design of the research should be carefully planned to yield results that are as objective as possible.
• The researcher should report with complete frankness, flaws in procedural design and estimate their effects upon the findings
• The analysis of data should be sufficiently adequate to reveal its significance and the methods of analysis used should be appropriate. The validity and reliability of the data should be checked carefully.
• Conclusions should be confined to those justified by the data of the research and limited to those for which the data provide an adequate basis.
• Greater confidence in research is warranted if the researcher is experienced, has a good reputation in research and is a person of integrity.