We've all come up against the argument that astrology has no statistical validity - how can the movements of the planets have an influence on a person's life? Well, if you're in the mood to get stuck in some astrological research to see whether you can find a link between behavioural traits and the natal chart, this is the article for you.

Are you really curious about what makes people tick? Are you intrigued by why they are the way they are? If you are so fascinated by certain behaviour or traits that you collect information about people and start to investigate the connections between their behaviour and their natal charts, then you are a researcher!

What makes research interesting is collecting all sorts of information and putting it together in such a way that others see what you are saying as fresh, stimulating and thought provoking. What you are doing is contributing to the growth and expansion of knowledge in the field of astrology.

In order to conduct research in a field and come up with convincing findings, there is a well-defined method for doing research that is followed by many researchers in all sorts of social, psychological and scientific disciplines. The basic structure of setting up a research study therefore applies to astrology as well.

What follows is a brief but fairly detailed discussion of the 'how to' of best practice in doing research and includes some examples related to astrology.

Firstly, you may be really intrigued by some phenomenon in life for which there is no satisfactory explanation. You may have looked for reading material on the topic and found very little information, or you may have found information that is sketchy, confusing or lacks credibility.

Finding an under-researched area of interest leads a researcher to formulate a statement about the topic - the problem statement. You may have seen the natal charts of Helen Keller, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder and been pondering about some detail in each of them. Your problem statement might read like this:

'There is a little written about blindness and malefic fixed stars associated with the natal chart. There is not enough evidence that the malefic 29deg Taurus and 29deg Scorpio in the natal chart is directly connected to blindness.'

Once you have discovered an area that needs investigation, you can articulate the purpose of your research so that your purpose statement flows from your problem. For example:

'The purpose of this research is to investigate the natal charts of all learners currently attending the Worcester School for the Blind in South Africa to establish whether there is a correlation between blindness and the presence of malefic fixed stars or the malefic 29deg Taurus and 29deg Scorpio in their natal charts.'

Your investigation could be framed around some specific research questions that would focus the direction of your investigation.

When these are clear in your mind, you have to decide how you are going to go about collecting your data. Are you going to approach the school to obtain permission to contact the pupils and their parents to ask for permission to use their natal charts? What kind of undertaking of confidentiality are you going to give participants? How are you going to give feedback on your findings to the participants? Are you going to approach only adults who were pupils at the school and who have completed their education there?

Assuming that you have a group of blind scholars or adults eager to give you their birth details and you have collected their charts, you have to decide how you are going to analyse the data. Are you going to focus on planets in Taurus and Scorpio; planets at 29deg only, angular planets; or all three conditions? Are you going to use any other criteria?

You could start to make simple and straightforward comparisons, note differences and other interesting findings. You could show your findings as graphs, charts or diagrams or you might decide to tabulate your findings and could do something like this:

You might want to make some more complex observations on your findings and point out relationships that are not so easy to discern.

Finally, you would want to highlight your findings by discussing what you think these mean so that you convince your readers of the plausibility of your conclusions.

If you are interested in making your research more rigorous and less speculative or attributable to chance, you may want to compare your findings with those in a control group. Then you would possibly use natal charts of sighted pupils born on the same dates as those pupils in the School for the Blind. If you can get large numbers of charts and show statistically significant results, using the expertise of a statistician, you could make a valuable contribution to global knowledge about blindness. Other astrologers would be able to replicate your study, perhaps in other parts of the world and corroborate your findings or refute them if their findings differ widely from yours.

You learn so much when you start doing research that we wish you a rich and exciting time while stretching your knowledge boundaries.