Exploratory Research Design
Exploratory research is used for studying problems that have not been researched consistently before. We use a qualitative approach in this design. Nevertheless, a quantitative one is applicable as well when the sample is large. This design is meant for preliminary research, so it is often called interpretive. You can also encounter one more name - a grounded theory approach because its nature is open-ended and you can apply it to every field of study pretty flexibly.
Exploratory design is similar to explanatory one. However, explanatory research deals with something that has already been discussed and well-described by other paper writers but the causes and reasons remain unidentified.
Why Do We Need Exploratory Research?
This design is mostly used when the problem is new but you may have difficulties with collecting data for evidence. Usually, you do not have the preexisting grounds for this problem. You may also have an overall idea or an innovative question to develop.
A juice bar owner has noticed that the increase in a variety of juices his bar offers to customers led to the decrease in the number of clients visiting the bar. The situation is strange and you need more information to explain it. The aim of the exploratory research here is to find the immediate reasons for such a situation and decide how the variety of offers influences the people’s choice of the bar to visit. The owner also needs to know what can happen if he reduces the juice options to the previous level.
Making Questions for Exploratory Research
Questions should help you learn and understand more about your topic. You need to define the backgrounds for your analysis and connections between the ideas. You do not have any assumptions and hypotheses about the issue, so your task is to formulate them clearly on the grounds of obtaining answers to these questions.
Have a look at these examples of such questions:
- ✔️ In what way do preschoolers engaged in a play-based program cope with transitions between multiple activities?
- ✔️ How often do senior college students report depression nowadays and what factors influence it?
- ✔️ What factors make it easier for men to leave their family and kids in comparison to women?
- ✔️ In what way does the number of rainy days in a year influence the likelihood of wildfires?
- ✔️ In what way do high school grades affect the success in the future career?
How to Collect Data for Exploratory Research?
If the topic or problem has not been previously researched, data collection can be challenging. This design can narrow down the topic with the help of a straightforward hypothesis. You can also receive the basis for your further research.
You can collect data in this format with the help of primary and secondary methods. After that you can analyze the results and continue with the hypothesis and evidence that can support or reject it.
Primary Research
Here, you can collect data immediately from the participants of your research. They are known as primary sources. You can do it in different ways, namely via:
- surveys: in our example, you can compose a survey about their juice preferences and send it to returning clients of the bar;
- interviews: you can interview the customers directly in the bar when they enter or leave it;
- focus groups: arrange several groups depending on their age, social status, or job, and ask them questions about the quantity of juice options but meant especially for the specific target audience.
Secondary Research
Think about looking for similar primary research that has been ever conducted by someone else. They may be based on the same or alike experiments or surveys. Or you can also use the data from:
- case studies: visiting the juice bar in different seasons of a year
- literature reviews: find the previous research about clients’ preferences and attitudes to a big or small number of choices
- online materials: blog posts, social media, polls, interviews, and discussions of the question: would you like to have a bigger or smaller choice of products when you want to buy something?
If it is adequate for the topic, you can also use official reports or governmental data such as the open-source decennial census in the USA.
How to Conduct Exploratory Research Step-by-Step?
The format of your exploratory research design depends much on what kind of method you will pick out for gathering data. However, in general, there are five steps to deal with this research. Let’s consider them one by one, following this example.
Teachers at the primary school have noticed that their students acquire most information when they have visual aids. However, if they do not use flashcards or videos, children start inventing their own roles and patterns and act them out more eagerly. So, the teachers started suspecting that visual aids prevent the development of creativity in kids.
Therefore, you want to research whether visual aids help or prevent acquiring information in young students via developing creative skills. However, the relationship between the visual information perception and creativity development in young students has not been studied yet. So, you choose the exploratory research design to investigate the correlation between visual aids and creativity.
1. Problem Identification
The correct identification of the research problem is the first step in this design. Remember that this problem has not been researched before, so an exploratory model is the best option.
So, you know that using visual aids in primary school is essential to help children acquire information. However, you have noticed that if you do not use them, your students start inventing new things and create new approaches to their knowledge acquisition via role playing and demonstrating things. Therefore, you start thinking that visual aids that are a focus for every primary school method are not so efficient if you want to develop creativity in your students.
You need to check whether there is another approach to the problem and teachers of young kids can do without visual aids.
2. Solution Hypothesis
You can think about the possible solution of this problem now. You need to make out a hypothesis statement that you will need to prove within your research.
The example of your hypothesis statement can be the following: you hypothesize that young students can acquire more information when the teacher does not use visuals in training and their creativity will boost. You believe that young kids can benefit a lot from this new approach.
3. Methodology Choice
Create a research design where you will indicate the methods for data collection and analysis.
For instance, you have decided to interview primary school teachers and ask them questions about advantages and disadvantages of teaching young kids without visual aids. Make sure that all your questions will also cover the creativity development.
4. Data Collection and Analysis
If the results of your interviews correspond to your hypothesis, you can start collecting and analyzing your further data. That is why it is so important that you should formulate your hypothesis before this stage and then be able to change it due to the obtained data to eliminate the risks. Exploratory research allows for changing the hypothesis, depending on your findings. You can do it because no one else has ever explored this problem, so it can have numerous approaches and explanations.
Now, after you have analyzed the results of the interviews, you can see that a big number of the teachers agree with your assumptions. They also believe that having too many visuals can prevent creativity development in their young students.
5. Prospects for Future Research
You may decide to continue your research, so you will need to switch to other methods and research designs. The exploratory research you have used is qualitative. However, you may need to explore a wider sample, so quantitative research will be more desired.
For example, since the preliminary results have complied with your initial hypothesis, you want to test the hypothesis more thoroughly, so a more extensive research type is needed. Make a list of suggestions and ideas for the future research.
You may even need an experiment in which you will ask the kids from several groups to learn some information with and without visual aids. All the participants will come from different schools in the region. Then, you can compare the results and make conclusions about the correctness of your hypothesis.
Benefits and Drawbacks of Exploratory Research
Every type of research design has its advantages and disadvantages. Exploratory research is not an exception. It provides both pluses and minuses.
| Benefits | Drawbacks |
|---|---|
| ✔️ It helps narrow down the difficult or sophisticated problem that has never been researched before. | ❌ The results can often be subjective or biased because you do not use any reputable backgrounds for your studies. |
| ✔️ It becomes a great helper for further research, either yours or someone else’s, so it makes it easier to add new ideas to already established framework. | ❌ The results cannot be externally valid or conclusive because mostly qualitative approach is used. |
| ✔️ The design is open-ended, flexible, cost-saving, and creative - you can choose any roads to proceed. | ❌ There is no existing research paradigm, so the research can be rather effort-consuming. |
Final Thoughts
Now, you know how to conduct the exploratory research step by step. Be sure that you need it in your academic work when no one else has ever investigated the problem of your interest before. Decide accurately on the methods and techniques you will be using within the process.
The preliminary results of this research will lead you to new investigations and discoveries. That is why you need to be accurate and conscientious about the process and its results.