POLS 367 Lecture Notes

Descriptive Research

A careful and deliberate attempt to describe situations and events. In scientific terms, descriptive research is more accurate and precise than explanatory research because these studies are more fact-based and focus, more simply, on describing what was observed without judgment or evaluation.

Descriptive studies address questions of what, where, when and how.

Examples include reporting the number of times a legislator voted for or against organized labor or the percent of American Indians in the United States.

Explanatory Research

This type of research goes beyond description of events and/or actions to include an assessment of why they occurred. In statistical analysis with an explanatory focus, researchers will test a variety of variables in attempt to identify both cause and effect for a given object under study.

In the social sciences, explanatory research introduces the concept of unexplained variance, or error, as described in class. The presence of error suggests, at least, that explanations offered from this type of research are not "perfect" explanations. However, explanatory research can be both reliable and valid.

This type of research is often designed to investigate an area on which little information exists. This includes the use of pilot studies, which are trial runs of an experiment. The aim is to gain more information before doing more thorough research.

Procedures must be made explicit for others to follow -- the basis for replication studies.

We make out work transmissible to Other researchers need to be able to replicate the study to determine if it is reliable research, from which future research agendas and conclusions can be formed.

Also important to test boundaries or limits of the research (e.g., whether similar results are obtained under different conditions).

Research conclusions can be applied in all similar contexts. This is an ideal for empirical research, but quite difficult to achieve in an absolute sense.