Research is a shortcut to knowledge and understanding that can replace the slower, more precarious road of trial and error in experience. Research introduces system, planning, and purpose into investigation, designed to test carefully considered hypotheses or answer thoughtfully framed questions. In the language of university catalogs, research broadens horizons and expands the frontiers of knowledge.

Research means systematic investigation. The word itself suggests reexamination, a repeated search. It begins with questions, inquiry, and perhaps some tentative answer. It plans and carries out investigations designed to find and test these suspicions. Essential characteristics of research include the facts that it is planned, designed investigation; carried our in a systematic manner; check or disprove hunches; to supplement and extend knowledge.  Research always seeks answer to questions or solutions. This objective is often to describe as the testing hypotheses.

Research is sharply distinguished from casual observation by its method and point of view. Research purposes to find answer to questions by systematic investigation and objective analysis. It is thus set apart from partisan argument or debate, in which facts may be selected to prove a point or justify a predetermined answer.

Manpower management research investigates problems of varying complexity. Some questions may be relatively simple and limited in scope. Others may be complicated, deep, broad, and penetrating. A local manager for the telephone company, for example, may undertake a survey of secretarial wage rates in his community. He collects data according to plan and analysis them by job, experience, to discover ranges of rates and averages for each category. Again, the training division of a manufacturing firm designs a study to check on the comparative effectiveness of two types of job training. A local employer association may ask its research division to analyze current practice in providing parking space for employees. A local union may employ a research assistant to compare and evaluate the language of contract clauses.

In one more complicates study, a firm may try to discover relationships between the management policies of branch managers and their effectiveness. Another study may seek measures of the influence of various rewards on employee or manager performance.

Some research can be conducted within a library. Some may require only data already in company files. Some studies are occasioned by problems encountered in daily practice. Others develop out of clues from campus research in similar or related areas in behavioral or other sciences.

Disputes frequently arise over the essentials of research, with arguments that descriptive studies or library investigations are not real research. Critics raise questions as to how deep or penetrating a study must be to justify designation as a research. Can all investigations qualify as a research? Does research have to discover shiny new knowledge? Must research look for relationships rather than simpler description?

The essential of all research is its viewpoint. Large or small studies, descriptive or analytical, having only immediate implications or very broad applicability and significance, all can be regarded as research if properly apply the methods and discipline of research.

The research approach is applicable to both simple and complex problems. It may be used to discover broad, general principles or to find answer to specific questions. It may seek an optimum solution for an immediate, pressing problem, it may test a theory with no apparent applicability.