The word “explanation” can mean making something clear to another person or answering the “why?” question by placing it within a relevant theory, set of ideas, or context. In explanatory research, we...

The word “explanation” can mean making something clear to another person or answering the “why?” question by placing it within a relevant theory, set of ideas, or context. In explanatory research, we create a research explanation, and the most common type, especially for deductivequantitative data, is a causal explanation. A causal explanation has three elements: time order, association, and ruling out alternative causes. These features are in the hypothesis. In the inductive approach commonly used with qualitative data, we often use grounded theory instead. It emerges after examining the data and builds an explanation by making comparisons.