The Tailwags of the Dog

The idea is that as you develop your own research question you will go over to the shelf with all of your Lego kits and you will pull the thing off that suits your particular research question. Problem is it doesn't always fit your research question right? And then you get into the tailwags of the dog. What that means is the kit that you need for your question doesn't exist. So you're going to pick one that's on the shelf that you conclude is closest to what you need but you may actually start modifying your theoretical question and your research hypotheses in order to fit that kit because you can't do what you really want. Your selection of a statistical model is actually dictating