Models in the Research Process

Exploratory Research
Research on the Basis of Earlier Theory
Hypothesis-based Study

When selecting the research method it is usually

advisable to consider whether you can base your
work on an earlier theoretical model. Sometimes a
model, even a preliminary one, can help your work
decisively, and in such a case it will also affect the
logical process of analysis. There are three
alternatives which are discussed in more detail later
on:

exploratory research (you have no model to start with),

expanding or refining an earlier model, and
research for testing hypotheses.

Exploratory Research
Research is exploratory when you use no earlier model as a basis of your study. The most usual reason for using
this approach is that you have no other choice. Normally you would like to take an earlier theory as a support,
but there perhaps is none, or all available models come from wrong contexts.

On the other hand, even when there is relevant theory and models, sometimes you may prefer not to use them.
Reasons for this can be:

Your goal is to document the object as completely as possible, not restricting the description to those
topics that have been documented in earlier studies.
The object of study differs from all earlier studied objects. The goal of the study is to describe its
exceptional character which existing theories are unable to portray. In the light of existing theories the
object of study appears as an inexplicable anomaly.
Phenomenological pursuit into deep understanding and distrust on earlier descriptions and explanations.

Exploratory research means that hardly anything is known about the matter at the outset of the project. You then
have to begin with a rather vague impression of what you should study, and it is also impossible to make a
detailed work plan in advance.

The gradual process of accumulating intelligence about the object of study means also that it will be impossible to
start by defining the concepts of study. You have to start with a preliminary notion of your object of study, and of
its context. During the exploratory research project, these provisional concepts then gradually gain precision.
In the absence of tried models and definite concepts you must start the exploratory study from what you have:
one or more objects of study. It is common that in the beginning of exploratory study you will take a holistic look
at the objects. It means that you start by gathering as much information about the objects as possible, and
postpone the task of cutting away unnecessary data until you get a better picture about what is necessary.

Any object can be looked at from several different viewpoints,

either from the angles of various established sciences or just
from miscellaneous practical points of view. As soon as
possible, you should specify the viewpoint of your study and
explain how you understand or "take" the object. This does not
mean that you have to to start your work by clarifying the
essence of your object of study, i.e. what the object really is.
Instead, you should try to contemplate and clarify how you see
the object: should it be defined on micro level as a result of the
individuals' instincts, drives and experiences, or maybe on macro
level as an expression of development in society.

The method of alternating point of view (like in the diagram

above) can even be used as a research method. It is especially
suited to an explorative researcher working alone. It will deepen his understanding and can sometimes reveal
valuable new aspects to the topic, cf. Hermeneutic Research.

The progress of a project of study becomes easier as soon as you have defined your point of view and your
problem. After this, you will need to gather only such empirical knowledge that is related to the problem; that
will enable you to restrict the material you will have to analyse. This does not mean that you should disregard all
the cases that do not fit into your conjectures - sometimes anomalies or surprising cases can point the way to
important amendments or corrections to existing theory.

Sometimes it is difficult to define what is relevant in advance; it only becomes apparent through analysis. In such
a case you can simply start by studying one single specimen or case which illustrates the interesting problem, and
then you continue studying a gradually growing number of objects until it becomes apparent that you cannot get
deeper into the problem. An indication of such a "saturated" state of study is that the study of new items or
cases no longer reveals new interesting information. You will often need to gather quite a lot of material before
you can define the final goal of your project, and a large part of this material will not be used in the final analysis.

The exploratory analysis of empirical field observations starts by checking that the field reports are written
down intelligibly and without ambiguity. Often the original reports have been made in hurry; in that case they
should be clarified by the initial observer or interviewer. The same person is often best adapted to extricate the
significant findings from observations because he/she is able to judge which details are important and which can
be left out. In the same time he/she can start building a preliminary model from those patterns which seem to
recur often, or estimate how well an earlier known model fits the observations.

As soon as the invariance in the data becomes apparent you can omit all the material that is no longer relevant
and compress the remaining, relevant information. This compacting is usually done with the help of coding the
typical and frequent elements, that is by assigning short names, letters or other symbols to them. By cross-
tabulating the symbols you can get an overall view of all the material, and it will be easier to uncover its structure
or rearrange it so that a latent structure becomes visible.
Analysis in exploratory research is essentially abstraction and generalization. Abstraction means that you
translate the empirical observations, measurements etc. into concepts; generalization means arranging the material
so that it disengages from single persons, occurrences etc. and focuses on those structures (invariances) that are
common to all or most of the cases.

It will seldom be possible to divide exploratory study into such clear phases as is common in the case that the
object has been studied earlier. According to Alasuutari (1993 p.22), in qualitative analysis of empirical findings,
you can distinguish two phases but these two overlap:

simplification of observations
interpretation of results (or "solving the enigma")

In the simplification phase, the material is inspected from the theoretical point of view of the study project, and
only the points relevant from this angle are noted. Details differing from one individual to another at random are
omitted or pushed aside so that the general lines of the data can be discerned more easily.

Simplification continues by finding the relationships between separate observations or cases. Some tools for this
work are comparison and classification. The goal is to find the general rule or model that is valid in all or most of
the observations. This model can be, for example, development or evolution, causality, or a conscious action to
attain an outcome which is typical in normative research. -- In any case the analysis starts from separate cases
and aspires to create one or a few general models.

"Solving the enigma" does not always mean answering exactly those questions that were asked at the outset of
the project. Sometimes the most interesting questions are found at the end of the research, when the researcher
has become an expert on the subject. It is often said that "data teach the researcher".

The purpose of descriptive exploratory research is to extract a structure from the source material which in the
best case can be formed as a rule that governs all the observations and is not known earlier (per the definition of
exploratory study). Finding the unknown structure may need some creative innovation, because even the most
sophisticated computerized analysis methods cannot automatically uncover which type of structure is concealed
in data. Usually you first have to formulate a tentative pattern for the assumed structure in the observations and
then you can ask the computer to estimate how well the data corresponds to the model, cf. Tools for Analysis.

In normative studies the exploratory approach is unusual, because the normative target - improving something in
the object - in general engages with a known theoretical background which you can take as a basis of your
study, thus shifting to the usually more effective method of Research on the Basis of Earlier Theory which is
explained in the next paragraph.

Nevertheless, sometimes it happens even in normative study that the direction of desirable improvement is initially
unclear, and your only choice is to start with the exploratory approach. Such is the situation when you know that
the present state of the object of study is unsatisfactory but you do not know exactly what is wrong in it, neither
do you know of any superior usable substitutes for it. For example, in the initial stage of action research
everybody perhaps agrees that the present mode of working is unbearable but all known remedies seem
inapplicable, and the participants therefore start making from empty table a descriptive model of the work to be
used as a basis of development.

Research on the Basis of Earlier Theory

Many of the problems of exploratory research can be
avoided if the researcher can start with a model,
developed in earlier studies, which he uses as a
"working hypothesis". The model can either consist of
cases (holistic model) or of concepts (analytic model).
During the analysis, the researcher tries to see
whether the collected material conforms to the model
or must he correct the model or look for a more
suitable one.

Often the study simply proceeds by enlarging an earlier model. A good rule to be followed in such a situation is:
Start from what is known. Proceed by enlarging the mapped area, and connect the new intelligence to
the known facts. Sometimes all that you need is only an adjustment of a few details in the existing model. This is
often the case when the study shall give grounds for a forecast or new product development and the environment
of intended application is slightly different from the one of the earlier study.

The existence of a tentative model helps in

selecting the logical structure of the entire
research project and planning it. The model
helps you to decide which material has to be
collected, from which cases or specimens and
about which attributes or variables of these
cases. Even the recording of observations is
facilitated because often you will be able to
utilize earlier definitions of variables. The same
applies to analysis methods: often you can
borrow them from earlier works.

In descriptive study the project is often

arranged as distinct phases, like in the diagram
above. First you demarcate the population
about which you need knowledge, then select a
sample, gather the empirical data, analyze
them, perhaps with the same method as in the earlier study from which the model was taken, and finally assess
the findings.

Adopting models from earlier treatises involves a risk: it can affect your observations so that you wrongly discard
the anomalies or those cases which too much differ from what would be expected on the basis of the old theory.
If this happens, you will never discover the weaknesses of the old model.
In normative study models are used for describing
the existing problems and defining the improvements
to the object of study. If you can find an existing
descriptive model of the object, made in an earlier
study, you can often transform it into a normative
model by adding an evaluative dimension to it. For
example, the model of industrial production on the
right can be made normative by adding the
dimension of profitability, and a target for it.

Methods for analyzing information and evaluations

with normative models are discussed in Normative
Case Study , Normative Comparison , Normative
Classification , Normative Study of Variables and
Normative History.

Once the target for development has been defined

with the help of a normative model, the project often
continues as planning the practical operations,
perhaps also realizing them and measuring the results.
Sometimes the same model can be used as a basis of
all these operations, like in the figure on the left, but
usually you will have to refine a model successively
several times in the process of transforming a
definition of goals into a plan of action or into a design of a product. The latter process, for example, can include
such phases as product concept, various drafts of design, a series of prototypes and finally a detailed proposal
for the product.

Optimally a normative research project proceeds through successive stages:

1. evaluation of the initial state and defining the need for improvements
2. analysis of relationships and possibilities to change things
3. synthesis: proposal for improvement
4. evaluation of the final state.

It is quite usual that you will have to repeat the above sequence several times
before you get an acceptable result. Normative projects often deal with complex
practical problems, and when making a theoretical model of the problem, the
researcher may wish to make the model more easily manageable by simplifying it,
i.e. by leaving out factors that seem nonessential. However, in the final practical
test or appraisal it may turn out that an excluded factor is important after all,
which makes it necessary to adjust the model and repeat the sequence once
more.

Hypothesis based Study

Sometimes the object of study is already well known and you just want to investigate its behaviour in a specific
situation. In such a situation you can choose to construct a hypothesis, i.e. an expectation of the behaviour of the
object, or a preliminary answer to the question that you are studying. You are usually free to decide if you want
to use one or not. E.g., if you want to learn if x really equals two times y, you can set as your hypothesis

x = 2y

During your project you then collect empirical data which allow you to test your hypothesis and see if it is true or
not.

Hypotheses are always based on analytic models, and they are often causal. They are always accurately stated
and quite often stated as an arithmetic model, like for example

y = f(x)

where
x = the independent variable,
y = the dependent variable.

The above hypothesis includes only one variable of each type; there are, however, usually more of them in real
research projects.

If you choose to use a hypothesis, you should plan the logic around it in the way that Bunge (1967, 9) explains:

1. Ask well formulated and fruitful questions.

2. Devise both grounded and testable hypotheses to answer the questions.
3. Derive logical consequences of the assumptions.
4. Design techniques to test the assumptions; test the techniques for relevance and reliability.
5. Execute the tests.
6. Interpret the results.
7. Evaluate the truth claims of the assumptions and the fidelity of the techniques; determine the domains in
which the assumptions and the techniques hold.

It is seldom - perhaps never - possible to reach an absolute certitude when verifying a hypothesis. This is the
case especially when the hypothesis is intended to hold true anywhere, i.e. also for the cases that are similar to
those that have been examined. Therefore most modern researchers accept in practice the idea that when
speaking of 'truth' of a hypothesis they actually mean verisimilitude or credibility. This distinction, nevertheless,
has no decisive consequences in practice: you can use 'credible' findings exactly in the same way as 'true'
findings.

Disturbances. Usually the object of study is influenced by various factors besides the independent variable
mentioned in the hypothesis. These disturbances, sometimes called "noise", prevent the researcher from clearly
seeing the influence of the independent variable. Such factors whose systematic influence is known beforehand
can simply be eliminated by making a suitable correction in the measurements. Unknown factors which cause
detrimental random variation in the dependent variable are more difficult to handle. The researcher can be
prepared for disturbances and for the random variation of the explained object in alternative ways:

By studying more cases and calculating the average of the data

By shielding the research object in such a way that the disturbing influences will be eliminated. This
usually requires an experiment set up in a laboratory.
By choosing the variables in the hypothesis in such a way that the influential variables are dealt with as
explaining factors and not as random variation.

The method of hypothesis was originally developed for descriptive studies. This type of research aspires to get
factual knowledge about the object of study, and the criterion which is used in accepting or rejecting a
descriptive hypothesis is factuality or truthfulness. The same criterion is applied to other phases of descriptive
project as well, as is explained in Assessing Input Data , Assessing Correctness of Analysis and Assessing
Theoretical Output.

In normative research a hypothesis is seldom used as such, but it is interesting to note that a normative project
often includes a decisive focal point which determines the project's success or failure in much the same way than
the test of a hypothesis does in a descriptive project. This focal point is the final practical testing of the
normative proposal. Because the target in normative study is not just to get information but primarily to improve
the object of study or other similar objects, the principal criterion when testing normative development proposals
is not truth but instead practical value and functional operativeness. This criterion is discussed in Evaluating
Normative Proposals.

Another difference to testing a descriptive hypothesis is that the process of development need not end in the test.
If the first proposal must be rejected the normal practice is to prepare and test another proposal. This means that
the process of development returns to that of normative research on the basis of earlier model, discussed above.

Tests of normative proposals are habitually carried out when developing a new product. Their procedures are
discussed in Presenting the Draft and Prototype and Evaluating a Design Proposal. Similarly, in the development
of an activity the project usually includes practical testing of the proposals, as described in Assessing Activity
Development.

August 3, 2007.
Comments to the author:

Original location: http://www2.uiah.fi/projects/metodi