Descriptive research

Ahmed Nagi is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where his research centers on Yemen.

Nagi is also research manager at the Institute of Citizenship and Diversity Management at Adyan Foundation, Lebanon, and a country coordinator on Yemen at Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem), Sweden. He is also a co-founder of Insight Source Center for Research and Consulting, Yemen.

Nagi holds a Master’s degree in public governance from the University of Granada, Spain. His research focuses on religious and tribal identities, citizenship, state building, civil society, conflict dynamics, and Yemen’s relations with its neighboring countries.

Social science research

In addition, the conceptualizing of descriptive research (categorization or taxonomy) precedes the hypotheses of explanatory research. For a discussion of how the underlying conceptualization of Exploratory research, Descriptive research and explanatory research fit together see Conceptual framework. Descriptive research is also known as Statistical Research. The main goal of this type of research is to describe the data and characteristics about what is being studied. The idea behind this type of research is to study frequencies, averages, and other statistical calculations. Although this research is highly accurate, it does not gather the causes behind a situation. Descriptive research is mainly done when a researcher wants to gain a better understanding of a topic. That is, analysis of the past as opposed to the future. Descriptive research is the exploration of the existing certain phenomena. The details of the facts won't be known. The existing phenomena’s facts are not known to the person.

Descriptive science

Descriptive science is a category of science that involves descriptive research; that is, observing, recording, describing, and classifying phenomena. Descriptive research is sometimes contrasted with hypothesis-driven research, which is focused on testing a particular hypothesis by means of experimentation.

David A. Grimaldi and Michael S. Engel suggest that descriptive science in biology is currently undervalued and misunderstood:

"Descriptive" in science is a pejorative, almost always preceded by "merely," and typically applied to the array of classical -ologies and -omies: anatomy, archaeology, astronomy, embryology, morphology, paleontology, taxonomy, botany, cartography, stratigraphy, and the various disciplines of zoology, to name a few. [...] First, an organism, object, or substance is not described in a vacuum, but rather in comparison with other organisms, objects, and substances. [...] Second, descriptive science is not necessarily low-tech science, and high tech is not necessarily better. [...] Finally, a theory is only as good as what it explains and the evidence (i.e., descriptions) that supports it.

A negative attitude by scientists toward descriptive science is not limited to biological disciplines: Lord Rutherford's notorious quote, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting," displays a clear negative attitude about descriptive science, and it is known that he was dismissive of astronomy, which at the beginning of the 20th century was still gathering largely descriptive data about stars, nebulae, and galaxies, and was only beginning to develop a satisfactory integration of these observations within the framework of physical law, a cornerstone of the philosophy of physics.

Descriptive versus design sciences

Ilkka Niiniluoto has used the terms "descriptive sciences" and "design sciences" as an updated version of the distinction between basic and applied science. According to Niiniluoto, descriptive sciences are those that seek to describe reality, while design sciences seek useful knowledge for human activities.

See also

• Normative science
• Procedural knowledge

External links

• Descriptive Research from BYU linguistics department