Goals of Research

By now you’ve learned about different types of reasoning, causality, and generalizability. We will now learn about different goals and purposes of research and how they relate to your research question. Later in this book we’ll explore different research methods and how to design a study that fits your research question. Before you can design a study, you should have a clear understanding of the aims of your study.

Explore, Describe, Explain

What you’ll want to study likely falls into one of three broad goals: exploring, describing, or explaining. Let’s examine how these goals can be met with research, while also considering how quantitative or qualitative methods can fit with these intentions. Each has a different purpose, so how you design your research project will be determined in part by this decision.

Researchers conducting exploratory research are typically in the early stages of examining their topics. These sorts of projects are usually conducted when a researcher wants to test the feasibility of conducting a more extensive study and to figure out the “lay of the land” with respect to the particular topic. Perhaps very little prior research has been conducted on this subject. If this is the case, a researcher may wish to do some exploratory work to learn what method to use in collecting data, how best to approach research subjects, or even what sorts of questions are reasonable to ask. A researcher wanting to simply satisfy their curiosity about a topic could also conduct exploratory research. For example, an exploratory study may be a suitable step toward understanding the relatively new phenomenon of college students’ addictions to their electronic gadgets.

It is important to note that exploratory designs do not make sense for topic areas with a lot of existing research. For example, it would not make much sense to conduct an exploratory study on common interventions for parents who neglect their children because the topic has already been extensive study in this area. Exploratory questions are best suited to topics that have not been studied much before. Students may justify an exploratory approach to their project by claiming that there is very little literature on their topic. Most of the time, the student simply needs more direction on where to search, however each semester a few topics are chosen for which there actually is a lack of literature. Perhaps there would be less available literature if a student set out to study child neglect interventions for parents who identify as transgender or parents who are refugees from recent wars. In that case, an exploratory design would make sense as there is less literature to guide your study.

Another purpose of research is to describe or define a particular phenomenon, termed descriptive research. For example, a researcher may want to understand what it means to be a first-generation college student or a resident in a psychiatric group home. In this case, descriptive research would be an appropriate strategy. A descriptive study of college students’ addictions to their electronic gadgets, for example, might aim to describe patterns in how many hours students use gadgets or which sorts of gadgets students tend to use most regularly.

Researchers at the Princeton Review conduct descriptive research each year when they set out to provide students and their parents with information about colleges and universities around the United States. They describe the social life at a school, the cost of admission, and student-to-faculty ratios among other defining aspects. Although students and parents may be able to obtain much of this information on their own, having access to the data gathered by a team of researchers is much more convenient and less time consuming.

Service providers, like social workers or family life educators, often rely on descriptive research to tell them about their service area. Keeping track of the number of children receiving foster care services, their demographic makeup (e.g., race, gender), and length of time in care are excellent examples of descriptive research. On a macro-level, the Centers for Disease Control provides a remarkable amount of descriptive research on mental and physical health conditions. In fact, descriptive research has many useful applications, and you probably rely on findings from descriptive research without even being aware.

Finally, researchers often aim to explain why particular phenomena work in the way that they do. Research that answers “why” questions is referred to as explanatory research. In this case, the researcher is trying to identify the causes and effects of whatever phenomenon they are studying. An explanatory study of college students’ addictions to their electronic gadgets might aim to understand why students become addicted. Does the addiction have anything to do with their family histories, extracurricular hobbies and activities, or with whom they spend their time? An explanatory study could answer these kinds of questions.

There are numerous examples of explanatory social scientific investigations. For example, the work of Dominique Simons and Sandy Wurtele (2010) ^[2] sought to discover whether receiving corporal punishment from parents led children to turn to violence in solving their interpersonal conflicts with other children. In their study of 102 families with children between the ages of 3 and 7, the researchers found that experiencing frequent spanking did, in fact, result in children being more likely to accept aggressive problem-solving techniques. Another example of explanatory research can be seen in Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee’s (2011) ^[3] research study on the connections between popularity and bullying. From their study of 8th, 9th, and 10th graders in 19 North Carolina schools, they found that aggression increased as adolescents’ popularity increased. ^[4]

The choice between descriptive, exploratory, and explanatory research should be made with your research question in mind. What does your question ask? Are you trying to learn the basics about a new area, establish a clear “why” relationship, or define or describe an activity or concept? The answer to this question will need to be considered along with the paradigms, theories, and levels you’ve already considered. How do these all work together for your research question?

Exploratory Research Questions

In exploratory research, the researcher doesn’t quite know the lay of the land yet. In this type of questioning, one does not have to be nearly as specific as they would in exploratory questions, described below. In fact, questions such as “What factors influence custody decisions when parents divorce?” are good because they will explore a variety of factors or causes without narrowing in on a specific factor just yet. In exploratory questions, we are usually looking at a relationship between two variables. We’re not looking to see if one is causing the other, just how they relate. Exploratory research questions can be quantitative or qualitative.

In some research designs, we’ll actually be looking to see if one, the independent variable, causes the other, the dependent variable. However, we’re not always looking for cause. In exploratory research, we’re really just looking to see if and how they might be related. Because we’re still in an exploratory phase, we don’t have to be as precise with our concepts as we might in other types of questions.

For example, in the question above, the independent variable, “factors influencing custody decisions” is pretty broad. It is the variable or factor we are interested in seeing the effect of. Even if that one is still pretty open, the dependent variable, or the outcome that we want to examine, is quite clearly written (custody decisions). The inverse can also be true. If we were to ask, “What outcomes are associated with open adoptions?”, we would have a clear independent variable, open adoption services, but an unclear dependent variable, outcomes. Because we are only conducting exploratory research on a topic, we may not have an idea of what concepts may comprise our “outcomes” or “factors.” Only after interacting with our participants will we be able to understand which concepts are important.

Qualitative exploratory studies can also be used to explore a topic. For example, a qualitative research question might ask, “What are the lived experiences of adolescent parents?” A qualitative study might collect data via interviews, asking adolescent parents to describe their experiences with parenthood and how it has affected their relationships, family dynamics, mental health, schooling, and so on. Because qualitative research findings are not generalizable, they cannot provide a comprehensive understanding of the lived experiences of all adolescent parents. However, qualitative research is a great way to start looking for themes and patterns related to your topic.

Descriptive Research Questions

Descriptive research can be qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative descriptive questions are arguably the easiest types of questions to formulate. For example, “What is the average student debt load of students in marriage and family therapy programs?” is an important descriptive question. We aren’t trying to build a causal relationship here. We’re simply trying to describe how much debt these students carry. Quantitative descriptive questions like this one are helpful for tasks like needs assessments, in which someone is trying to determine what needs or resources exist in a community so that they can better tailor services.

Quantitative descriptive questions will often ask for figures such as percentages, sums, or averages. Descriptive questions may only include one variable, such as ours included the variable of student debt, or they may include multiple variables. When asking a descriptive question, we cannot investigate causal relationships between variables. To do that, we need to use a quantitative explanatory question.

Qualitative descriptive research questions do exist, but they are less common. The more participants you have in your study, the more likely it is that your findings will be generalizable and reflect broader patterns in the general population. Qualitative studies are generally focused on richness and depth, rather than generalizability. A qualitative researcher might prioritize learning as much about participants’ experiences and perspectives as possible over having a large number of participants. This might mean interviewing 30 people, rather than distributing questionnaires to 500 people.

Explanatory Research Questions

The goal of explanatory research is to identify relationships between variables. Structurally, quantitative explanatory questions must contain an independent variable and dependent variable, and they should ask about the relationship between these variables in a very clear way. My standard format for an explanatory quantitative research question is: “What is the relationship between [independent variable] and [dependent variable] for [target population]?” You should play with the wording for your research question, revising it as you see fit. The goal is to make the research question reflect what you really want to know in your study. In many cases, we are interested in some kind of causality, thinking that the independent variable influences the dependent variable in some way, but we have to be very careful when we actually design a study to capture this causality. This is something we’ll spend quite a bit of time on in later chapters, but for now, know that you can ask explanatory questions, but “proving” cause is very, very difficult in social science research. 

Most studies you read in the academic literature will be quantitative and explanatory. Why is that? Earlier in this chapter you learned about causality and generalizability. Explanatory research tries to build “nomothetic causal relationships,” which are findings that are generalizable across space and time, so they are applicable to a wide audience. The editorial board of a journal wants to make sure their content will be useful to as many people as possible, so it’s not surprising that quantitative research dominates the academic literature.

Because the goal of explanatory research is to establish causality or correlation between variables, most explanatory studies are quantitative. However, qualitative descriptive research can provide a foundation for a subsequent qualitative explanatory study. Let’s consider our example of a qualitative study about adolescent parents’ lived experiences. You might expect many of the adolescent parents you interview to face educational barriers, such as having to drop out of high school to care for their child. This expectation is likely based on prior research on adolescent parents. This knowledge may also influence the types of questions you ask in the interviews, such as inquiries about participants’ educational experiences. The interview data you collect might support prior research. However, because you will likely be interviewing a small number of participants (think about how crazy it would be to try to interview 300 people), it wouldn’t be appropriate to try to generalize your findings to all adolescent parents. What you learn from your interviews might prompt you to design a follow-up quantitative explanatory study.

Remember, no single research study will answer all the questions you have about a topic. Each type of study provides a unique perspective. Ideally, one researcher (or multiple) will conduct a series of studies on the same topic, each with a different approach or lens. Together, all these studies will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the topic!

Once you’ve identified the purpose(s) of your research, you can refine the wording of your research question to align with that purpose. You’ll also be prepared to design your study in a way that aligns with your research question and purpose.