Hello everybody, my name is Konstantinos
Kirytopoulos and in this video, we are
talking about research approach. There
are plenty of approaches that one can take
in research. Some of the times the
research approach is dictated
by the research itself however most of
the times it is the researcher that
needs to pick a specific approach and the
main thing is the classification where
we fit in different kind of
classifications in research. One kind of
classification would be exploratory,
descriptive, or explanatory.
So, in exploratory research you would
like for instance to know if Building
Information Modeling is used in
Australian companies. In descriptive
research we might want to know how many
Australian companies are using Building
Information Modelling, so it's a kind of
describing what is happening and in
explanatory, what we are going to do is
answer a question "why". So, why is Building
Information Modeling used by Australian
companies. Exploratory explores what is
happening, descriptive describes what's
happening and explanatory explains why
what we observe is happening. This is one
kind of research classification. Another
one is relating to what we call the
research philosophy. So in this kind of
classification we have two extremes. One
of them is positivism... and the other
is interpretivism. In positivism, we
assume that there is a real answer to
what is happening to what we are
researching on. So positivism is very
much applied in Natural Sciences. We are
looking for specific answers how things
are working in our world and usually
there can't be much debate when
we have our findings but interpretivism
is usually appearing in social sciences. In social sciences plenty of times there
is no right or wrong answer. It is only
how people perceive what is happening
and with interpretivism we acknowledge
that and we are practically
researching on the interpretations of
people about certain phenomena. In
between the two we have what we call
realism. Realism would stand between the
two acknowledging that
there is one part that it is knowledge
that we can obtain and it is not
questionable, while on the other hand
there will be some parts of this
research that will be most towards
interpretivism. Which practically means
that there will be different perceptions
about what is happening. It's a kind of
merging between the two and this is the
second kind of classification that we
can do. One other very basic kind of
classification is whether we are doing
deduction or induction. And in order to
answer this question we need to go
through the triangle of research. So in the
triangle of research we will have our data,
we will have analysis and of course
we'll have the theory.
In induction, what is happening is that
we are starting from collecting the data
without really making any prior
assumption of what we are
going to find, we get the data, from the
data we do the analysis and from the
analysis we come up with kind of a
theory of what is happening our
interpretation after the analysis of the
data that we gathered and this would be
the induction. So, induction straight
lines. On the other hand, we have
deduction. In deduction we are taking a
theory and we are trying to either
validate it or reject it. So, we are
starting from the theory the theory is
giving the hypothesis the assumptions what we are expecting to find
then we collect the data and after
having collected the data we do the
analysis and this will be the deduction...
dotted line. So the basic three kinds of
classifications would be exploratory
descriptive or explanatory, the other one
would be the research philosophy which is
positivism interpretivism or maybe
realism and there are plenty of other
differentiations that fine-tune exactly
how we perceive research and of course
deduction or induction which is
practically dictated from how we are
approaching the research triangle, if
we're starting from data moving towards
a theory or if we're starting a theory
moving towards analysis. Good luck!
