Comparar métodos

	Investigación Descriptiva	Investigación por Encuestas	Investigación de Tendencias
Campo	Diseño de investigación	Diseño de investigación	Diseño de investigación
Familia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Año de origen	Late 19th century; formalized in social/behavioral sciences ~1960s–1980s	Late 19th century; methodologically systematised 1940s–1960s	Mid-20th century (formalised in social science methodology ~1950s–1960s)
Autor original	Francis Galton, Karl Pearson (early empirical tradition); formalized in social science by Fred Kerlinger	Francis Galton, Charles Booth, and early social statisticians; systematised by Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues at Columbia in the 1940s	Earl Babbie and survey research tradition
Tipo	Non-experimental quantitative research design	Quantitative (and mixed) non-experimental design	Quantitative longitudinal research design
Fuente seminal	Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (4th ed.). Sage. ISBN: 978-1452226101	Fowler, F. J. (2014). Survey Research Methods (5th ed.). Sage Publications. ISBN: 978-1452259000	Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (4th ed.). Sage. ISBN: 978-1452226101
Alias	descriptive study, descriptive survey design, observational descriptive research, non-experimental descriptive research	survey methodology, questionnaire research, survey design, survey study	trend study, trend survey, longitudinal trend study, time-series survey
Relacionados	3	4	4
Resumen	Descriptive research is a non-experimental quantitative design that systematically documents the characteristics, frequencies, or distributions of variables in a defined population at a given point in time. It answers 'what is' questions — who, what, when, where, and how much — without manipulating variables or drawing causal conclusions. It is one of the most widely used research designs across the social, behavioral, health, and education sciences.	Survey research is a quantitative (and sometimes mixed-methods) design in which a researcher collects standardised self-report data from a sample drawn from a defined population, using a questionnaire or structured interview. It is the dominant non-experimental strategy for describing population characteristics, estimating prevalence, mapping attitude distributions, and testing bivariate or multivariate associations across social, behavioural, and health sciences.	Trend research is a longitudinal quantitative design that tracks changes in a characteristic of a general population over time by surveying different, independently drawn samples at two or more time points. Unlike panel studies, the same individuals are not followed; rather, each wave draws a fresh sample from the same population, allowing researchers to detect population-level shifts in attitudes, behaviours, or conditions while avoiding the attrition and panel conditioning problems of repeated-measures designs.