Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 78

The purpose of exploratory research is to examine concepts or themes that are not well known. Suppose you are interested in the theme of adolescent moral values, especially with regard to stages of decline. How does an adolescent typically move from one stage of morals to a lower one? The literature database PsycINFO has approximately 4 million articles, so it seems like a good way to examine how much is known about a subject like this. A review of this database in May 2016 with the words “moral decline” resulted in only six articles, but none of these articles addressed the theme of stages of moral decline. Perhaps we now know that this theme has not been researched very much. If we continue our search of the vast literature that is available, we will likely find something on this theme, but our examination of this large database shows that there is not a vast amount of literature on it. So perhaps an explanatory or exploratory study is needed.

A key issue for the exploratory study is whether the methods employed capture the essence of the theme you are pursuing. Exploratory studies will be connected with qualitative measurement in this book, not because you must use qualitative methods but because there is a natural fit between exploratory research and qualitative measurement. The exploratory study attempts to go into themes on which there is little existing knowledge. Qualitative measurement is more flexible than quantitative measurement. It seems logical that flexible measurement would be suitable for finding more information when little information is readily available.