EXPLORATORY STUDY DESIGN

An exploratory design is conducted about a research problem when there are few or no earlier studies to refer to. The focus is on gaining insights and familiarity for later investigation or undertaken when problems are in a preliminary stage of investigation.

The goals of exploratory research are intended to produce the following possible insights:

· Familiarity with basic details, settings and concerns.

· Well grounded picture of the situation being developed.

· Generation of new ideas and assumption, development of tentative theories or hypotheses.

· Determination about whether a study is feasible in the future.

· Issues get refined for more systematic investigation and formulation of new research questions.

· Direction for future research and techniques get developed.

What exploratory studies tell you

1. Design is a useful approach for gaining background information on a particular topic.

2. Exploratory research is flexible and can address research questions of all types (what, why, how).

3. Provides an opportunity to define new terms and clarify existing concepts.

4. Exploratory research is often used to generate formal hypotheses and develop more precise research problems.

5. Exploratory studies help establish research priorities.

What exploratory studies don't tell you

1. Exploratory research generally utilizes small sample sizes and, thus, findings are typically not open to generalization to the population at large.

2. The exploratory nature of the research inhibits an ability to make definitive conclusions about the findings.

3. The research process underpinning exploratory studies is flexible but often unstructured, leading to only tentative results that have limited value indecision-making.

4. Design lacks rigorous standards applied to methods of data gathering and analysis because one of the areas for exploration could be to determine what method or methodologies could best fit the research problem.

What essentially is the difference between confirmatory/experimental and exploratory research?

Confirmatory research tests a priori hypotheses—outcome predictions that are made before the measurement phase begins. Such a priori hypotheses are usually derived from a theory or the results of previous studies. The advantage of confirmatory research is that the result is more meaningful, in the sense that it is much harder to claim that a certain result is statistically significant. The reason for this is that in confirmatory research, one ideally strives to reduce the probability of falsely reporting a non-significant result as significant. This probability is known as α-level or a type I error. Loosely speaking, if you know what you are looking for, you should be very confident when and where you will find it; accordingly, you only accept a result as significant if it is highly unlikely to have been observed by chance.

Exploratory research on the other hand seeks to generate a posteriori hypotheses by examining a data-set and looking for potential relations between variables. It is also possible to have an idea about a relation between variables but to lack knowledge of the direction and strength of the relation. If the researcher does not have any specific hypotheses beforehand, the study is exploratory with respect to the variables in question (although it might be confirmatory for others). The advantage of exploratory research is that it is easier make new discoveries due to the less stringent methodological restrictions. Here, the researcher does not want to miss a potentially interesting relation and therefore aims to minimize the probability of rejecting a real effect or relation, this probability is sometimes referred to as β and the associated error is of type II. In other words, if you want to see whether some of your measured variables could be related, you would want to increase your chances of finding a significant result by lowering the threshold of what you deem to be significant.

DESCRIPTIVE STUDY DESIGN:

Descriptive research designs help provide answers to the questions of who, what, when, where, and how associated with a particular research problem; a descriptive study cannot conclusively ascertain answers to why. Descriptive research is used to obtain information concerning the current status of the phenomena and to describe "what exists" with respect to variables or conditions in a situation. Examples are case-study, naturalistic observation and surveys. It attempts to describe and explain conditions of the present by using many subjects and questionnaires to fully describe a phenomenon. Surveys include cross sectional and longitudinal studies using questionnaires or structured interviews for data collection with the intent of generalizing from a sample to a population. The objective is to examine the relationships between two or more groups of variables.

Phenomenology researcher examines human lived experiences through detailed description of the people being studied (informants). The procedure involves studying a small number of subjects through extensive and prolonged engagement to develop patterns and relationship of meanings. The objective is to describe human experiences.

Grounded Theory researcher conducts multiple stages of data collection and the refinement and interrelationship of categories of information. The primary characteristics of this design are the constant comparison of data with emerging categories, and theoretical sampling of different groups to maximize the similarities and differences. The final objective is to derive a theory.

What descriptive studies tell you

1. The subject is being observed in a completely natural and unchanged natural environment. True experiments, whilst giving analyzable data, often adversely influence the normal behavior of the subject.

2. Descriptive research is often used as a pre-cursor to more quantitatively research designs, the general overview giving some valuable pointers as to what variables are worth testing quantitatively.

3. If the limitations are understood, they can be a useful tool in developing a more focused study.

4. Descriptive studies can yield rich data that lead to important recommendations.

5. Appoach collects a large amount of data for detailed analysis.

What descriptive studies don't tell you

1. The results from a descriptive research can not be used to discover a definitive answer or to disprove a hypothesis.

2. Because descriptive designs often utilize observational methods [as opposed to quantitative methods], the results cannot be replicated.

3. The descriptive function of research is heavily dependent on instrumentation for measurement and observation.

Date: 2014-12-28; view: 1368