DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH

In the preceding units, you have been learning some research studies that adopt the qualitative
approach. You have got enough of that. So let us shift our studies to those research methods which adopt the quantitative approaches. In this unit, you are going to learn the details of descriptive research. Descriptive research as the name implies describes what is. This involves the description, recording, analyzing and interpreting such conditions that exist. It is one of the most popular research methods in the world.

OBJECTIVES

By the end of this unit, you should be able to:-

• Explain descriptive research 
• Describe the main steps in conducting descriptive research 
• Discuss the types of descriptive research 

INTRODUCTION OF DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH

The main aim of descriptive research is to describe “What exists” with respect to variables or conditions in a situation. They are designed to obtain information about the current status of a given phenomenon.

You can say that they are concerned with the existing conditions or relationships, prevailing practices, current beliefs, points of view or attitudes processes that are on-going and their effects, developing trends etc. 

They determine the nature of situations as they exist at the time of the study. It is very appropriate in behavioural sciences. You can see that there are behaviours which may be of interest to you as a researcher and which cannot be arranged in a realistic setting. Think of one example of this. For instance, you know it is not possible for you as a researcher to arrange for a motorcycle accident to happen so that you can assess the effectiveness of the use of crash helmets in preventing serious injuries by „Okada riders. Again, you know that it is not possible for you to bring some people and give them cigarettes to b smoking so that you can study the effects and relationship with lung cancer.

You know that some experimental studies of human behaviour can be appropriately carried out both in the laboratory and in the field. But the prevailing method which is mostly used in social sciences is descriptive. Human behaviour can be systematically examined and analyzed under the conditions that naturally exist at home, inside the classroom, on the play ground or within the community, family, social circle etc. The analysis can lead to the modification of factors or influences that determine the nature of human interaction.

MAIN STEPS IN DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH.

Descriptive studies do not present private convictions or data based on casual or cursory
observations rather you:

• Examine the Problematic situations 
• Define the problems and state your hypotheses. 
• List the assumptions upon which your hypotheses and procedures are based. 
• Select appropriate subjects and source materials. 
• Select or construct techniques for collecting data. 
• Validate the data gathering techniques. 
• Make objective an discrimination observations 
• Describe analyses and interpret your data in clear, precise terms. 

The summary of it all is that as a research, what you do is to collect evidence on the basis of
some hypotheses, tabulate and summarize the data carefully, and then analyze the results thoroughly in order to draw meaningful generalizations that will advance knowledge.

 Collection of data

When you write you descriptive research report, you must identify the kind of data obtained as
well as the exact nature of all population. What are the units that constitute your population? Are they people, items, events or objects? After you have identified the population, you must decide whether to collect data from the total population or a representative sample of the population.

Total Population

If you want to obtain information from every unit of a small population, it may not be very difficult in some cases, but the findings can not be applicable to any population outside the group studied. For instance when you collect information, from every student of school of Business and Human 

Resources Management from Lagos study centre, you may draw your generalizations based on the information. But you cannot claim these generalizations will hold true for students from the same school of BHRM outside Lagos Centre.

Sample Population:

When you try to obtain information from a large population for instance all the teachers in Imo state, you will see that it is often not practicable, impossible or exorbitantly costly. If you try to contact, observe, measure or interview every unit in the group, you will realize that it may take so much time that the information may become still or absolute before you complete the study. To this effect what you do is to collect information from a few carefully selected units drawn from the population. This few units are called samples. For instance assuming you want to study the study habits of NOUN students and there are about 75,000 students in all study centres of NOUN. You can see that you cannot collect data from all these students. What will you do? You will have to select a representative sample of this population.

It means you have to select your sample from different categories of the student population.
Hence, male/female, employed/unemployed, graduates/undergraduates etc. If you sample represents accurately the characteristics of the population, the any generalizations based on the data obtained from them may be applied to the entire group. But it is not easy to select a representative sample. We shall discuss this in other parts.