Exploratory research design: definition, types and ways to implement

An exploratory research is conducted when it is necessary to understand the general nature of the problem, identify possible alternatives to the solution, as well as relevant variables that need to be taken into account.

Usually the amount of information that serves as the basis for the research papers is negligible. Methods of data collection should be flexible, unstructured, and qualitative – since the researcher starts to work, often without a clear idea of ?? what information he can get. The main task of such research is the search for ideas and hypotheses, understanding the situation. Its principal usefulness lies in the possibility of concretizing general and ambiguous definitions of the problem by reducing them to laconic working hypotheses. Search researches are especially important in breaking up a broad and unclear formulation of the problem into more precise subproblems, ideally formulated in the form of hypotheses or statements about how two or more measurable quantities are interconnected.

What is Exploratory Research?

Types of Exploratory Research

Advantages and Disadvantages of Exploratory Research

Exploratory research like any phenomenon has good and bad sides. As for advantages, they are:

• design is a useful approach for gaining background information on a particular topic;

As for disadvantages, they are:

• exploratory research generally utilizes small sample sizes and, thus, findings are typically not generalizable to the population at large;