Читать книгу Methods in Psychological Research - Annabel Ness Evans - Страница 43

Descriptive research involves describing a population of measurements. Usually, inferences are made from a representative sample to a population, except in the case of censuses, in which entire populations are measured. This is the type of research we see in the media from polling agencies, and the primary interest is in describing how the population thinks. Descriptive research has applications in business, where it is used to understand the consumer, and in social services, where you need to understand the needs of your community.

The focus of explanatory research is to answer “why” questions. For example, you may find that there are more women than men in your psychology program. That finding alone is a description, but you may want to know why there are more women than men. In explanatory research, you are interested in explaining why there is a gender difference. You are trying to account for the difference. The simplest explanation would be that there are just more women in the university. You could test this by comparing the gender ratio in psychology with the gender ratio in other disciplines. In this case, you are investigating a relationship between gender and university discipline. Finding a difference may lead to an explanation of why there are more women than men in your psychology program.

Often research may contain aspects that are both descriptive and explanatory. For example, researchers studying drug use in schools may want to describe the prevalence of drug use and also try to account for why some students take drugs and others do not.