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3.1: Goals of the Research Project

  • Page ID
    124453
    • Anonymous
    • LibreTexts
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    Learning Objectives
    • Understand and describe the differences among exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory research.
    • Define and provide an example of idiographic research.
    • Define and provide an example of nomothetic research.

    A rnews story about college students’ addictions to electronic gadgets (Lisk, 2011)Lisk, J. (2011). Addiction to our electronic gadgets. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/hea...tion.cnn?iref=allsearchdescribes findings from some research by Professor Susan Moeller and colleagues from the University of Maryland (http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com). The story raises a number of interesting questions. Just what sorts of gadgets are students addicted to? How do these addictions work? Why do they exist, and who is most likely to experience them?

    Sociological research is great for answering just these sorts of questions. But in order to answer our questions well, we must take care in designing our research projects.

    One of the first things to think about when designing a research project is what you hope to accomplish, in very general terms, by conducting the research. What do you hope to be able to say about your topic? Do you hope to gain a deep understanding of whatever phenomenon it is that you’re studying, or would you rather have a broad, but perhaps less deep, understanding? Do you want your research to be used by policymakers or others to shape social life, or is this project more about exploring your curiosities? Your answers to each of these questions will shape your research design.

    Exploration, Description, Explanation

    You’ll need to decide in the beginning phases whether your research will be exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory. 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 at 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; he or she wants 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 his or her own curiosity about a topic could also conduct exploratory research. In the case of the study of college students’ addictions to their electronic gadgets, a researcher conducting exploratory research on this topic may simply wish to learn more about students’ use of these gadgets. Because these addictions seem to be a relatively new phenomenon, an exploratory study of the topic might make sense as an initial first step toward understanding it.

    In my research on child-free adults, I was unsure what the results might be when first embarking on the study. There was very little empirical research on the topic, so the initial goal of the research was simply to get a better grasp of what child-free people’s lives are like and how their decision to be child free shapes their relationships and everyday experiences. Conducting exploratory research on the topic was a necessary first step, both to satisfy my curiosity about the subject and to better understand the phenomenon and the research participants in order to design a larger, subsequent study.

    Sometimes the goal of research is to describe or define a particular phenomenon. 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 use of gadgets varies by gender or college major 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 (http://www.princetonreview.com). They describe the social life at a school, the cost of admission, and student-to-faculty ratios (to name just a few of the categories reported). 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.

    Market researchers also rely on descriptive research to tell them what consumers think of their products. In fact, descriptive research has many useful applications, and you probably rely on findings from descriptive research without even being aware that that is what you are doing.

    Finally, sociological 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 he or she is studying. An explanatory study of college students’ addictions to their electronic gadgets might aim to understand why students become addicted. Does it have anything to do with their family histories? With their other extracurricular hobbies and activities? 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, in a study, Dominique Simons and Sandy Wurtele (2010)Simons, D. A., & Wurtele, S. K. (2010). Relationships between parents’ use of corporal punishment and their children’s endorsement of spanking and hitting other children. Child Abuse & Neglect, 34, 639–646. 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 research (2011; American Sociological Association, 2011)Faris, R., & Felmlee, D. (2011). Status struggles: Network centrality and gender segregation in same- and cross-gender aggression. American Sociological Review, 76, 48–73; the American Sociological Association wrote a press release summarizing findings from the study. You can read it at asanet.org/press/Press_Releas...ment_Peers.cfm. The study has also been covered by several media outlets: Pappas, S. (2011). Popularity increases aggression in kids, study finds. Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/11737-pop...udy-finds.html on the connections between popularity and bullying. They found, from their study of 8th, 9th, and 10th graders in 19 North Carolina schools, that as adolescents’ popularity increases, so, too, does their aggression.This pattern was found until adolescents reached the top 2% in the popularity ranks. After that, aggression declines.

    Idiographic or Nomothetic?

    Once you decide whether you will conduct exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory research, you will need to determine whether you want your research to be idiographic or nomothetic. A decision to conduct idiographic research means that you will attempt to explain or describe your phenomenon exhaustively. While you might have to sacrifice some breadth of understanding if you opt for an idiographic explanation, you will gain a much deeper, richer understanding of whatever phenomenon or group you are studying than you would if you were to pursue nomothetic research. A decision to conduct nomothetic research, on the other hand, means that you will aim to provide a more general, sweeping explanation or description of your topic. In this case, you sacrifice depth of understanding in favor of breadth of understanding.

    Let’s look at some specific examples. As a graduate student, I conducted an in-depth study of breast cancer activism (Blackstone, 2003).Blackstone, A. (2003). Racing for the cure and taking back the night: Constructing gender, politics, and public participation in women’s activist/volunteer work. PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. To do so, I joined an organization of local activists and participated in just about every aspect of the organization over a period of about 18 months. Perhaps it goes without saying, but over the course of a year and a half of participant observation, I learned quite a bit about this organization and its members. In other words, the study revealed the particular idiosyncrasies of the group, but it did not reveal much about the inner workings of other breast cancer activist organizations. Armed with an in-depth understanding about this single group, the study made a contribution to knowledge about how activists operate. For one thing, the organization I observed happened to be one of the largest and most well known of its type at the time, and many other organizations in the movement looked to this organization for ideas about how to operate. Understanding how this model organization worked was important for future activist efforts in a variety of organizations. Further, the study revealed far more intimate details of the inner workings of an activist organization than had it, say, instead been a survey of the top 50 breast cancer organizations in the United States (though that would have been an interesting study as well).

    My collaborative research on workplace sexual harassment (Uggen & Blackstone, 2004),Uggen, C., & Blackstone, A. (2004). Sexual harassment as a gendered expression of power. American Sociological Review, 69, 64–92. on the other hand, aims to provide more sweeping descriptions and explanations. For this nomothetic research project, we mailed surveys to a large sample of young workers who look very much like their peers in terms of their jobs, social class background, gender, and other categories. Because of these similarities, we have been able to speak generally about what young workers’ experiences with sexual harassment are like. In an idiographic study of the same topic, the research team might follow a few workers around every day for a long period of time or conduct a series of very detailed, and lengthy, interviews with 10 or 15 workers.

    KEY TAKEAWAYS
    • Exploratory research is usually conducted when a researcher has just begun an investigation and wishes to understand her or his topic generally.
    • Descriptive research is research that aims to describe or define the topic at hand.
    • Explanatory research is research that aims to explain why particular phenomena work in the way that they do.
    • Idiographic investigations are exhaustive; nomothetic investigations are more general.
    EXERCISE
    1. Describe a scenario in which exploratory research might be the best approach. Similarly, describe a scenario in which descriptive and then explanatory research would be the preferred approach.

    This page titled 3.1: Goals of the Research Project is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Anonymous.