Prescriptive Research

When we make suggestions to people, recommend actions or choices, and give directions we "prescribe" solutions to their problems or situations. Those prescriptions are sometimes based on prior experience, prior knowledge, having done a little troubleshooting, a full-scale consultant investigation, or even "prescriptive research".

It is no accident that prescriptive research is heavily used in the practical fields of business and computer programming. Research is constantly taking place both informally and formally into better ways to do things, processes with greater efficiency, and routines which affect the level of "humanity" in out policies or procedures.

Not all of this sort of research is positive. Dr. Mengale in Auschwitz could be said to have been conducting prescriptive research when he starved inmates and monitored their output and how little could be fed people and still get the most residual life out of them before they finally were wrung out. It was designed to be of use in prescribing the optimum levels of feeding for slave labor, with minimum cost...a practice which many CEO's might be regarded as doing with labor rates in toadies' brave new world economy.

On a cheerier note, there are many examples of very exciting prescriptive research:

• Research into better pedagogical process to recommend for mathematics education in light of new brain-function research
• Research into better instructional design processes for web-based instruction
• Research into better ways to support female entrepreneurs given the new surge in female involvement in small business.

One Doctoral level course in research notes the need for solid traditional style scientific research to undergird the rising need for such prescriptive research, while another author bemoans the shift away from Doctoral work in Operations Management because the faculties have stayed with traditional research while students are pushing for more applied research using qualitative methods. He suggests the road ahead for Universities is to try to bridge the gap. Edel Conway and John McMackin recommend that Prescriptive Research be done to develop and undergird better recommendations for companies seeking to be innovative in the Human Relations Management area, because what is being passed out is sub-standard in their opinion.

Further Resources

Google search for "prescriptive research" definition, which gives a number of good examples of this research

An interesting evaluative tool for improving prescriptive research

An abstract from a prescriptive research report in the instructional design area

An abstract from a research study into "learning company" wisdom which examined the content of such recommendations.