Types of Social Science Research: From Applied to Experimental

Research is the engine that drives our understanding of human society, and in the field of population and family health, choosing the right type of research can shape policies that affect millions of lives. Whether the goal is to reduce maternal mortality in a rural district or simply to understand why adolescents drift away from traditional family values, researchers select from a toolkit of distinct approaches. Each type has its own purpose, philosophy, and method. Let’s unpack the five most important categories: applied, fundamental, action, participatory, and experimental research.

Why the type of research matters 🔗

Before designing any study, a researcher must decide what they are trying to achieve. Are they hoping to solve an immediate problem, like high dropout rates among adolescent girls? Or are they trying to build a theory about why dropouts happen in the first place? The answer determines the type of research used. Picking the wrong approach can waste resources, produce findings nobody can use, or worse, draw incorrect conclusions about a community. The classification of research types is not just an academic exercise; it is the foundation of credible, useful knowledge.

Applied research: Solving problems on the ground 🔗

Applied research is conducted with a specific, practical goal in mind. The researcher begins with a real-world problem and works backward to find a solution. The aim is not to develop grand theories but to better human conditions in a measurable way. Studies on improving immunisation coverage, increasing crop yields, or reducing tuberculosis treatment dropout rates all fall under this umbrella.

In the Indian context, much of the work funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research qualifies as applied research. Studies on the effectiveness of the Janani Suraksha Yojana in increasing institutional deliveries, or evaluations of mid-day meal schemes on child nutrition, are designed to produce findings that policymakers can act on quickly. Applied research is typically classified by its defined specific application, distinguishing it from pure investigations of health knowledge.

Strengths and limitations 🔗

The biggest strength of applied research is its immediate utility. Governments, NGOs, and hospitals can use the findings to refine programmes within months. However, applied research often has limited generalisability. A solution that works in Tamil Nadu may not transfer cleanly to Bihar because of different cultural, economic, and infrastructural realities. Researchers must therefore be cautious about overstating their conclusions.

Fundamental research: Knowledge for its own sake 🔗

Fundamental research, also called basic or pure research, seeks to expand human knowledge without worrying about immediate application. It asks the “why” questions that lay the foundation for future applied work. Why do certain communities resist family planning? How do gender norms develop in early adolescence? What role does kinship play in caregiving for the elderly? These questions may not have an obvious practical use today, but their answers fuel tomorrow’s interventions.

A great deal of foundational work in population studies comes from this tradition. Studies on fertility transitions, marriage patterns, or migration trends published by institutions like the International Institute for Population Sciences often begin as fundamental investigations before their insights inform policy. The Indian Council of Social Science Research supports a wide range of such studies that probe national issues without demanding immediate deliverables.

The link between fundamental and applied research 🔗

It is a mistake to view these two types as competitors. Fundamental research generates the theoretical scaffolding that applied research depends on. For example, decades of basic research on the social determinants of health eventually informed the design of community health worker programmes like ASHA. Without that earlier theoretical groundwork, applied interventions would lack direction.

Action research: Researching while doing 🔗

Action research blurs the line between researcher and practitioner. Instead of studying a problem from the outside, the researcher becomes part of the action, working alongside the community or organisation to bring about change. The approach was coined by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. According to Lewin’s original framing, action research is a comparative study of the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, conducted through a spiral of planning, action, and fact-finding.

Imagine a primary health centre struggling with poor patient turnout for antenatal check-ups. An action researcher would not just survey the community and write a report. They would work with the staff to design an intervention, test it, observe what happens, and refine the approach in cycles. The result is both new knowledge and a tangible improvement in services.

Where action research is used 🔗

Action research is widely used in education, public health, and organisational development. Teachers studying their own classrooms, nurses improving ward practices, and community health programmes refining their outreach all use this approach. Lewin believed that cooperation between researchers and practitioners was essential for meaningful social change. Its strength lies in producing solutions that are immediately tested and refined; its weakness is that findings are highly context-specific and may not transfer to other settings.

Participatory research: Power to the community 🔗

Participatory research takes the collaborative spirit of action research one step further. Here, the community is not just a participant in the research process but a co-investigator. Community members help frame the questions, gather the data, interpret the findings, and decide how the results will be used. This approach is rooted in the belief that those affected by a problem have unique knowledge about it and a right to shape any inquiry concerning their lives.

Participatory research is particularly powerful for tackling deep-rooted issues like poverty, caste-based discrimination, gender violence, and unequal access to healthcare. It emerged partly as a response to traditional research that treated communities as passive subjects to be studied. As scholars have noted, participatory research overlaps with traditional methods like ethnography and intensive interviews, but its defining feature is the engagement, not detachment, between researchers and the people being studied.

Participatory action research in practice 🔗

A common hybrid is participatory action research (PAR), which combines community involvement with cycles of action. NGOs working on tribal health, women’s self-help groups, and adolescent reproductive health programmes often use PAR to design interventions that the community itself owns. The approach is widely used in applied developmental psychology for designing intervention programmes ranging from youth delinquency prevention to family-centred services. The democratic nature of participatory research means that findings are more likely to be accepted and implemented locally.

Challenges 🔗

Participatory research is time-consuming and demands genuine trust between outsiders and insiders. Researchers must be willing to share control over the agenda, which can be uncomfortable. There is also a tension between political engagement and scientific objectivity, since active participation in social change can complicate claims of neutral observation.

Experimental research: Testing hypotheses in controlled settings 🔗

Experimental research brings the rigour of the scientific method into social inquiry. It involves testing a specific hypothesis by manipulating one variable while controlling others, often comparing an “experimental” group with a “control” group. The goal is to establish cause-and-effect relationships with as much certainty as possible.

In population and family health studies, experimental research is most visible in the form of randomised controlled trials (RCTs). A classic example is testing whether conditional cash transfers to pregnant women improve institutional delivery rates. One group receives the cash transfer, another does not, and outcomes are compared. The famous work of development economists on poverty interventions, recognised by the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, helped popularise field experiments in social science.

Beyond the laboratory 🔗

Not all experimental social research happens in laboratories. Field experiments, quasi-experiments, and natural experiments allow researchers to study social phenomena in real-world conditions while still maintaining some control over variables. Lewin himself demonstrated that complex social phenomena could be explored using controlled experiments, a legacy that continues in modern behavioural economics and public health research.

Ethical considerations 🔗

Experimental research raises serious ethical questions, especially when it involves withholding a potentially beneficial intervention from a control group. Institutional review boards, ethics committees, and clear protocols for informed consent are essential safeguards. In population and family health, where vulnerable groups are often involved, ethics is not an afterthought but a core part of the design.

How these types work together 🔗

In reality, most research projects in population and family health blend more than one type. A study on adolescent reproductive health might begin with fundamental research to understand cultural attitudes, move into applied research to design an intervention, use participatory methods to involve the community, and then apply experimental techniques to test the intervention’s effectiveness. The boundaries between these categories are useful as a teaching tool but porous in practice.

Recognising this overlap helps researchers avoid the trap of methodological tribalism, where one approach is treated as inherently superior. The best research matches its method to its question, not the other way around.

Choosing the right approach 🔗

For a student or early-career researcher, the choice of research type depends on three things: the nature of the question, the resources available, and the level of community involvement that is feasible. A small classroom study on student attitudes lends itself to action research. A large-scale evaluation of a national health scheme might require an experimental or applied design. A deep dive into the lived experience of widowhood in rural communities calls for participatory or fundamental approaches.

Understanding these distinctions is not just useful for writing a research proposal. It shapes how findings are interpreted, communicated, and ultimately used to improve lives.

What do you think? If you were studying a sensitive issue like child marriage in your home district, which type of research would you choose, and why? Can you think of a population health problem that would genuinely benefit from being approached through participatory rather than experimental methods?

References

1. https://www.icmr.gov.in/
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2766381/
3. https://iipsindia.ac.in/
4. https://icssr.org/research-projects
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research
6. https://www.toolshero.com/change-management/action-research/
7. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/participatory-research
8. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/participatory-action-research
9. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/summary/
10. https://infed.org/mobi/kurt-lewin-groups-experiential-learning-and-action-research/