For Quantitative work three design approaches are available, what are these approaches?

EXPLORATORY

CAUSAL

DESCRIPTIVE

Exploratory design is essentially investigatory. It usually occurs at the preliminary stages of any research exercise, especially when a problem, product or service is new. It is used to inform a full research plan. The approach taken is informal, creative and driven step by step in an evaluative way. The design can employ descriptive statistics, intuition, hunches, guesses and judgement.

Causal designs seek to establish relationships between the CAUSE and EFFECT of events. For example is an increase in positive attitudes caused by an increase in advertising. In terms of analysis the techniques usually used are hypothesis tests on means and correlation. The former can utilise the full range of data types, the latter can utilise two data types (ratio data for correlation and ordinal data, for rank correlation)

Descriptive design is the most widely used approach. It can be used to profile consumers, customers, or businesses. It can be used to gauge opinion or perceptions. Analyses of data to support such research can be wide and varied, incorporating descriptive measures, inference, hypotheses and special statistical tests. It also assumes some appreciation of psychology and anthropology.