 Dear students, we are studying the dimensions of social research. And in previous modules, we have talked about the use and audience of research. Now we are going to study the second dimension of research which is a purpose of research. And on the basis of purpose of research, we categorize three types of research which are explorative research, descriptive research, and explanatory research. Now we are going to study what is explorative research and what is descriptive research and how explanatory research differs from the descriptive and explorative research. First of all, let's see what is explorative research. Explorative research is conducted to examine a little understood issue or phenomenon. Explorative research is conducted when there is a limited knowledge of a social issue or phenomenon. Explorative research is conducted to develop preliminary ideas about it and move towards refined research questions. On the basis of explorative research, we develop research questions to understand a research problem. So when we conduct explorative research, we conduct explorative research to understand emerging social issues and problems. As you have just seen, we have witnessed a pandemic situation all around the world. After COVID-19, the world changed. And when this COVID-19 outbreak occurred, at that time, there were very few people in the world who had seen the pandemic situation before. The whole world was locked down. And the economic crisis of the world stopped, the social mobility of the world stopped. So people had not studied the impact on people's lives before that. To understand this, the initial research studies conducted were called explorative research studies. For example, what was the impact on COVID's mental health? What was the impact on people's social life? How did COVID trigger domestic violence? So when these issues were studied in the initial days, the studies conducted were called explorative research. And we conduct explorative research to study social and cultural change in any society. We conduct explorative research when there is a social and cultural change in any society. As you know, this is a time period of civilization. We call it the world of technology. And it is not a day-to-day process. And it is also believed that the major character of social and cultural change is the technology. Today, technologies are being invented and the world is changing on its basis. And how does it affect people in a different way? What is its social impact? What is its economic impact? What is its political impact? What is its impact on individual's health? So the research that is done to understand this is called explorative studies. And we conduct explorative research to discover various dimensions of any sudden change. When there is a sudden change, we conduct explorative studies to understand its dimensions. For example, we have recently seen that Pakistan has badly affected by the blood. And a lot of people became internally displaced from their communities. So what was its dimension? What was its gender dimension? What was its economic dimension? What was its political impact? And how did it affect our GDP? To understand this, we call the initial studies explorative studies. Why do we do explorative research? We have to understand that why we do the explorative research. We do the explorative research to determine the feasibility of conducting research. We are capable of exploring the basis of explorative research to understand how we can study the dimensions of any social issue or any change. And we develop techniques for measuring and locating future data. And based on that, we develop its tools on the basis of explorative research results. For example, when COVID-19 came, the initial studies that came out were that COVID-19 is affecting the mental health of the people. In order to understand the mental health of the people, various researchers developed the new scales. One of them was the fear of COVID-19. The fear of COVID-19 was assessed by the people. And based on that, how is their mental health? Whenever there is a sudden change or a new social phenomenon, we are capable of exploring the basis of explorative research to tell our research community how we can further investigate it and how we can conduct research studies on it.