DEFINITION OF RESEARCH

The aim, as far as I can see, is the same in all sciences. Put simply and curiously, the aim is to make known something
previously unknown to human beings. It is to advance human knowledge, to make it more certain or better fitting.
The aim is… discovery. (Elias 1986).

We want to discover something. We want to know something that was previously unknown to human beings. It will
be important that research is the same in all sciences so you can do or you can discover something in any science
and you basically are going to make some things more certain or better fitting or you will discover something totally
new but there are going to be some stratification within the research.

The very first stratification is between the scientific and social science research so the very first is scientific and on
the other hand, social science research. In scientific research you really can imagine some doctors in laboratories
experimenting maybe and it would be quite a good fit. Your picture will be quite well fitting because scientific
research is relying on you can say in Natural Sciences and the very basic idea of a scientific research is that it should
be replicable or it can be replicated because why you are relying on some natural sciences such as mathematics,
physics or chemistry? Whenever or wherever in the world you are going to do it, it should be replicated with quite a
similar result and another quite a nice addition of a scientific research should be that this research that you do
should enlarge or enrich. It should enrich the overall body of your science. If you do really a scientific research, you
are not going to do some Applied Research. You are not going to take some touristic attraction and research. What is
so special there? Because you are too narrow with your field and if you really want to be scientific, you should
generally contribute or enrich the science within which you are doing your research. On the other hand, this social
science research, you are going to meet something called the deposit antipositivism. The basic idea when here is
antipositivism it is going to be positivism and this idea or this philosophy was made by Auguste Comte and it is
relying on Natural Sciences that the research should be replicated, it should enrich the overall body. But
antipositivism is rather looking inside of people’s minds. What does this mean? If you are doing on the other hand
the natural science research you are not really looking what leads the people into this sort of a behaviour whether in
social science research you can tell yourself “ok, these people can help different behaviour according facing different
situations so you can react to the result of resurgent, change your behaviour accordingly to it. These are the very
basic differences between scientific and social science research but maybe the more important certification or the
more practical one you are going to meet is the stratification according to the types of research. What kinds of
research there can be? At first you want to describe what is there. Then you are going to describe why these things
happen or how do they happen or why do they happen and finally it is a special case and it is going to consider our
results: are we really right? We have special names for these kinds in case of what research so we are discovering
what is going on and what is happening. We call it a descriptive research so. And from the name you already can see
that we are going to describe things, how do they occur and when or where o they occur and when we know this
what happens we are going to have explanatory research that will tell us how and why these things happen. It will
simply explain how or why things are as they are and maybe using this to predict maybe we can thanks to know that
we know how things happen. We can predict some future and finally we are going to help evaluative research and
this is quite a simple. When you do a research maybe you do it for some governmental organization and it will ask
you: “was our policy and was our program right?” So we should do some evaluative research to evaluate or find out
whether our program or policy was fine.