Exploratory research

Exploratory research often represents a poorly defined problem area. It is difficult to produce concrete, focused results, and it will be more difficult to find relevant references to existing body of knowledge.

However, this type of research may be interesting as it allows to explore a new area.

As the term suggests, exploratory research is conducted because a problem has not been clearly defined or its real scope is unclear. Exploratory research helps determine the best research design, data collection method and selection of subjects, and sometimes it even concludes that the problem does not exist!

Another reason for conducting exploratory research is to test concepts before they go into the market. In concept testing, consumer is provided with a written concept/prototype for a new or revised product, service or strategy.

Exploratory research can be quite informal, relying on secondary research such as reviewing available literature and/or data, or qualitative approaches such as informal discussions with consumers, employees, management or competitors, and more formal approaches through in-depth interviews, focus groups, projective methods, case studies or pilot studies.

The results of exploratory research are not usually useful for decision-making by themselves, but they can provide significant insight into a given situation. Although the results of qualitative research can give some indication as to the "why", "how" and "when" something occurs, it cannot tell us "how often" or "how many".

Topic added by--Constantinescu 12:34, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)