Descriptive and Exploratory Research &

What is the difference between Descriptive and Exploratory Research?

• Descriptive research, being quantitative in nature, is restrictive in terms of open ended questions, which can be better answered using exploratory research.

• Flexibility of design is offered by exploratory research more than by descriptive research.

• Descriptive research is used more to arrive at statistical tools such as mean, average, median and frequency. On the other hand, exploratory research allows the researcher to develop designs that are more qualitative in nature.

• The amount of information known to the researcher at the start of the research plays an important role in deciding upon the type of research. With only vague ideas in the minds of the researcher, it is better to go for exploratory design. On the other hand, more information such as quantitative data allows a researcher to go for descriptive research that leads to unearthing causal relationships.

• Exploratory research needs to be conducted first to have a platform that allows for collation of data required in descriptive research.