ABSTRACT
The relationship of research activities to the availability of research resources is an important difference between applied and basic research. In much of what is commonly considered basic research, a proposal is prepared, and if funding is granted the project is initiated. Applied research is accomplished under time, financial, human, information and physical resource constraints. In the process of fitting a project to the resource restrictions, three alternatives are possible; the resources may be expanded to fit the project, the project may be narrowed to fit within the restriction, or both may occur within limits. Information in general and data specifically are as critical to the problem identification phase of the project as they are to analysis. Data and information requirements are narrowed and brought into focus by careful research planning. Experimentation is a means of obtaining data with relatively high precision in measurement of the variables.
