ABSTRACT
The general purpose of all research studies, except those that we call (purely) descriptive, is to look for relationships between variables (see Fig. 5.1). We divide approaches to research into three general types: experimental, individual differences (or nonexperimental), and descriptive. The first type of approach has an active independent variable, the second has an attribute independent variable, and the descriptive approach does not have an independent variable. We use the label descriptive approach more narrowly than some writers to indicate studies that do not use inferential statistics to test hypotheses.
