So what is a research strategy? It is the activity that needs to be undertaken to ensure that there are adequate resources available to complete the study in the time available, to make sure that the approach to the design of the study is the appropriate one to achieve the study's objectives, that suitable softwares are available to manage and analyse the data, that sensible sets of data are collected to ensure that analysis will allow the required information to be extracted, and so on.
A research strategy can evolve and is not necessarily cast in stone. Things can go wrong; for example, unexpected field conditions (drought or flood) may cause a study to fail. Thus, the original strategy may need to be thought through again and revised. Case Study 6, which describes the different studies used to evaluate the benefit of providing smallholder dairy farmers in Kenya access to credit to allow increased feeding of concentrates to cows in early lactation, demonstrates how research strategies can change