Chapter 2 surveys current practices. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? How does the process of research unfold? How often does research end up in the dustbin (“file-drawer”)? What different intellectual trajectories are exemplified by the careers of social scientists? Using surveys and interviews, this chapter maps the lay of the land.

Chapter 4 discusses general strategies for finding a topic. This includes (a) finding your passion, (b) the life of the mind, (c) reading the secondary literature, (d) appraising the state of the world, (e) the familiar and the unfamiliar, (f) specializing and generalizing, and (g) the old and the new.

Chapter 6 introduces a case-based approach to exploratory research. Here, a tight focus on particular case or a small number of cases allows for a detailed but preliminary exploration of phenomena. For this purpose, we lay out techniques of case selection where the analysis is exploratory rather than confirmatory. These techniques may be categorized as (a) extreme, (b) index, (c) deviant, (d) most-similar, or (e) diverse.

Chapter 5 offers a variety of heuristics for discovery. This includes (a) turning answers into questions, (b) play, (c) skepticism towards words and numbers, (d) error and anomaly, (e) analogies, (f) intellectual arbitrage, (g) thought experiments, (h) processes and variables, (i) hermeneutics, (j) abstraction, and (k) failure.

Chapter 7 lays out methods for soaking and poking, which we categorize broadly as (a) ethnographic, (b) archival, or (c) statistical. These techniques may be focused on a chosen case, on many cases, or may be enlisted in situations where cases are not well-identified.

Chapter 11 concludes our study with a close look at the transition from exploration to testing. First, we discuss various steps involved in vetting a research project. This includes a calculation of costs, payoffs, and risks; a consideration of research ethics; and extensive market-testing. In the second section, we discuss when to go public with preliminary ideas and findings. In the third section, we consider what to reveal about the research process. Finally, we discuss the contrast between exploratory to confirmatory research.

Exploratory research is an attempt to discover something new and interesting by working through a research topic and is the soul of good research. Exploratory studies, a type of exploratory research, tend to fall into two categories: those that make a tentative first analysis of a new topic and those that propose new ideas or generate new hypotheses on an old topic. This chapter examines the history of exploratory studies, offers a typology of exploratory studies, and proposes a new type of exploratory study that is especially helpful for theorizing empirical material at an early stage. It argues that exploratory studies are an important part of a social scientist’s toolkit.

The research design is the overall plan for relating the conceptual research problem to relevant and practicable empirical research. In other words, the research design provides a plan or a framework for data collection and its analysis. It reveals the type of research (e.g. exploratory, descriptive, or causal) and the priorities of the researcher. The research methods, on the other hand, refer to the techniques used to collect and analyse data. This chapter looks at a variety of research designs and methods, as well as at the concept of validity.

The research design is the overall plan for relating the conceptual research problem to relevant and practicable empirical research. In other words, the research design provides a plan or a framework for data collection and its analysis. It reveals the type of research (e.g. exploratory, descriptive, or causal) and the priorities of the researcher. The research methods, on the other hand, refer to the techniques used to collect and analyse data. This chapter looks at a variety of research designs and methods, as well as at the concept of validity.