Comparer des méthodes

	Recherche causale-comparative	Recherche Descriptive	Recherche par enquête
Domaine	Conception de la recherche	Conception de la recherche	Conception de la recherche
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1964	Late 19th century; formalized in social/behavioral sciences ~1960s–1980s	Late 19th century; methodologically systematised 1940s–1960s
Auteur d'origine	Fred N. Kerlinger	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
Type	Non-experimental quantitative research design	Non-experimental quantitative research design	Quantitative (and mixed) non-experimental design
Source fondatrice	Kerlinger, F. N. (1964). Foundations of Behavioral Research. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.	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
Alias	ex post facto research, causal-comparative design, retrospective causal study, CCR	descriptive study, descriptive survey design, observational descriptive research, non-experimental descriptive research	survey methodology, questionnaire research, survey design, survey study
Apparentées	3	3	4
Résumé	Causal-comparative research is a non-experimental quantitative design in which the researcher compares two or more groups that already differ on an independent variable — one that was not manipulated — to investigate possible causes or consequences of that difference. Because group membership is pre-existing rather than randomly assigned, the design can suggest causal relationships but cannot establish them with the certainty of a true experiment. It is widely used in education, psychology, and social sciences when experimental manipulation is impractical or unethical.	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.