Exploratory vs. confirmatory research (2 hours)

↵ Back to module homepage

Another important distinction is that between exploratory and confirmatory research. Confirmatory research is what you do when you have a hypothesis already (before you start the study), and you design a study to test whether that hypothesis is true. Exploratory research is what you do when you don't have a specific hypothesis in mind, but you collect or create data in order to see what patterns might emerge. Some people (myself included) prefer to call "confirmatory" research hypothesis-confirming or hypothesis-testing research, and call "exploratory" research hypothesis-generating research. These terms make the difference between these kinds of research, and the relationship between these kinds of research, clear: exploratory research is what you do to discover new things, which may lead you to think of new hypotheses, and you can later do confirmatory research to test those hypotheses. Neither type of research is inherently better than the other, and in fact neither kind of research could exist without the other: without exploratory research we wouldn't think of new hypotheses to test in confirmatory studies, and without confirmatory research we would have no way to prove or disprove the theories we make up during our exploratory research. The research cycle needs to include both kinds of studies.

Nevertheless, while both kinds of research are important, maintaining a clear distinction between them is also crucial. If you do exploratory research and then present it as if it were confirmatory research (e.g., if you collect a lot of data without any specific hypothesis, and then you notice an interesting pattern in the data, and then you publish a paper in which you say "I have a really smart theory, and based on my theory I predicted something will happen, and then I did an experiment and indeed my prediction was right!") that is dishonest and misleading; this issue is discussed in much more detail in the "p-hacking" module.

For more information on hypothesis-generating (exploratory) vs. hypothesis-confirming (confirmatory) research, you can check the following papers. You don't need to read any of them in their entirety; they're just provided for extra information. The Sakaluk paper in particular is valuable for its description of how both types of research can work together.

• Jaeger, R., & Halliday, T. (1998). On confirmatory versus exploratory research. Herpetologica, 54, S64-S66.
• Nilsen, E., Bowler, D., & Linnell, J. (2020). Exploratory and confirmatory research in the open science era. Journal of Applied Ecology, 57, 842-847.
• Sakaluk, J. (2016). Exploring small, confirming big: an alternative system to The New Statistics for advancing cumulative and replicable psychological research. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 66, 47-54.

When you finish this activity, you are done with the module (assuming all your work on this and the previous tasks has been satisfactory). However, you may still continue on to the advanced-level task for this module if you wish to complete this module at the advanced level (if you're aiming for a higher grade or if you are just particularly interested in this topic). Otherwise, you can return to the module homepage to review this module, or return to the class homepage to select a different module or assignment to do now.

by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-05-02. CC-BY-4.0.