Descriptive research: defining your respondents and drawing conclusions

What is descriptive research?

It is conclusive rather than exploratory in nature. This means that descriptive research gathers quantifiable information that can be used to make statistical inferences about your target audience through data analysis. As a consequence, this type of research takes the form of closed-ended questions, which limits its ability to provide unique insights. However, when used properly, it can help an organisation to define and measure the significance of ‘something’ relating to a group of respondents and the population that they represent more effectively.

Do you want to gain a better understanding of how descriptive research fits into the bigger picture? If so, go ahead and learn about the three main types of survey research – exploratory, descriptive and causal – to see how each approach serves different research objectives and when to use them.

When it comes to online surveys, descriptive research is by far the most commonly used form of research. Organisations usually use this type of research to find out and measure the strength of a target group’s opinion, attitude or behaviour with regard to a given subject. However, descriptive research is also commonly used to determine demographical traits in a certain group (age, income, marital status, gender, etc.). This information can then be studied at face value, to measure trends over time or to conduct more advanced data analysis such as drawing correlations, segmentation, benchmarking and other statistical techniques.

Although descriptive research provides conclusive data, you may need to start with a more flexible approach to understand which questions to ask. Learn more about exploratory research methods to help you identify key themes and develop focused research questions before conducting your descriptive study.

The trick to conducting any type of research is to gain only valuable information. In the case of online surveys, your collected data should allow you to take action on a particular problem or opportunity facing your organisation. This is why it is essential to create research objectives before you jump into your survey design. Research objectives identify exactly what you are trying to discover in order to make educated decisions about the issues facing your organisation. For example, let’s suppose that a website wants to collect visitor feedback. They could break down their research objectives according to different aspects of their site, such as navigation, quality of information and aesthetics. With properly defined research objectives, you’ll be able to create a questionnaire that provides relevant insights that give a clear direction towards action.

The next step involved in conducting effective descriptive research is ensuring the accuracy of your results. This involves limiting bias and error in your surveying design and research method. With sample surveys, a degree of error is unavoidable. However, it is important to control your margin of error and confidence levels by ensuring that you have a proper survey sample size.

Do you need an audience for conducting your descriptive research? If so, find out how SurveyMonkey Audience can help you build the right set of contacts to survey.

Organisations use descriptive research in a plethora of ways. We already know that going into the survey design phase with clearly defined research goals is critical, but how do we know that our research plan will provide useful information? To understand what your research goals should entail, let’s take a look at the three main ways in which organisations use descriptive research today:

All closed-ended questions aim to define a specific characteristic of respondents more clearly. This could include gaining an understanding of traits or behaviours, such as asking your respondents to identify their age group or specify the numbers of hours they spend each week on the internet. It could also be used to ask respondents about their opinions or attitudes, such as how satisfied they were with a product or their level of agreement with a political platform.

In essence, all of this information can be used by an organisation to make better decisions. For example, a retail store that discovers that the majority of its customers browse sale items online before visiting the store would give it insight into where it should focus its advertising team.

By harnessing the statistical capabilities of descriptive research, organisations are able to measure trends over time. Let’s consider a survey that asks customers to rate their level of satisfaction with a hotel on a scale of 0–10. The resulting value is mostly arbitrary by itself. After all, what does an average score of 8.3 actually mean? However, if the hotel management makes changes in order to meet their customer needs more effectively, they will be able to conduct the same survey again at some point in the future to see whether the new average score has increased or decreased. This will enable the hotel to effectively measure the progress it is making in terms of increasing customer satisfaction over time as well as to measure the effects of its new initiatives and processes.

Organisations also use descriptive research to draw comparisons between groups of respondents. For example, a shampoo company creates a survey asking the general public several questions measuring their attitudes about the company’s products, advertising and image. In the same survey, they may ask various demographic questions about factors such as age, gender and income.

Afterwards, the company will be able to analyse the data to compare different groups of people and their attitudes. For example, the company may statistically identify the difference in opinion between genders and age. They may discover that there is a statistically low opinion of their company’s image among young adult males. This might result in them creating a new line of products to try to cater for this demographic.

If your research goals fit into one of these three categories, you should be on the right track. Now all you have left to do is decide how the collected data will help your organisation take action on a certain issue or opportunity. Remember that conducting a successful survey is only half the battle: it’s what you actually do with the gathered information that makes your research project useful.