Lecture#2 Exploratory Research (Types of Research)

types of research

1. EXPLORATORY RESEARCH It is conducted to give better understanding of a situation. By this research, researchers hope to produce hypotheses about what's going on. We can not accept or reject the hypothesis with exploratory research as that job is left for descriptive and/or causal research. This type of research isn’t designed to come up with final answer or decision.

2. Example: Sale of a particular vehicle dropped during the last year. Now as a researcher you need the insight that what is going on and what caused the decrease in sales . What we have to do we can interview potential car buyers and found that they are more excited about the new designs of other cars. HYPOTHESIS: style preferences had changed leading to low sales.

3. Drawback Exploratory research does not provide definite answers for the overall population. It can provide very rich, meaningful information or even definite explanations for particular individuals. It usually involves very small group of people which are almost never randomly selected to participate.

4. OTHER Purposes Sometimes its necessary to define the problem, in particular the research problem that might be addressed. It is also used to increase a researcher’s familiarity with a problem, especially when the researcher doesn’t know much about the organization and/or problem to study.

5. Note Regardless of the particular methods employed exploratory research should almost be relatively small in size as we simply an not afford to devote the bulk of the research budget to exploratory research.

6. TYPES OF EXPLORATORY RESEARCH Exploratory Research Focus Groups Case Analyses Depth Interviews Literature Search

7. LITERATURE SEARCH A search of popular press (newspapers, magazines, etc ), trade literature, academic literature or published statistics from research firms or government agencies for data or insight into the problem at hand.

8. DEPTH INTERVIEWS These are interviews with people that are knowledgeable about the general subject being investigated. These are used to tap the knowledge and experience of those with information relevant to the problem at hand. Anyone with the relevant information is a potential candidate for the depth interview.

9. EXAMPLE A Children book publisher gained value able information about a sales decline by talking with librarian and school teachers who indicated that more and more people were using library facilities and buying fewer books for their children.

10. A series of depth interviews can be very expensive as:- Well trained interviewers demand high salaries. Data is collected from one respondant at a time. If data recorded then audio/video recording must be transcribed, coded and analyzed.

11. However Depth interviews can yield important insights and more often than not is well worth the effort.