Social Research — Nature and Purpose, Types of methodology — comparative, descriptive, diagnostic, exploratory, experimental

Every Law Commission report, every judgment that cites social data, and every policy paper on reservation or crime relies on someone having actually collected and analysed evidence about how society behaves. Social research is that evidence-gathering discipline, and knowing its basic types — descriptive, diagnostic, exploratory, comparative, experimental — lets you tell a rigorous study from an anecdote dressed up as data.

In two minutes

Social research is the systematic, evidence-based study of social phenomena, undertaken to describe, explain, diagnose or compare social reality, and it takes different forms — exploratory, descriptive, diagnostic, comparative and experimental — depending on what kind of question it is trying to answer.

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