The essence of all this is that exploratory and confirmatory research are two complementary components of the same goal: to discover relevant findings in the most efficient, reliable, replicable, applicable manner.
They are complementary because researching always starts with a complex unknown issue. An issue that must be observed even before finding which hypotheses must be further confirmed.
As J.W. Tukey states in his renowned work, we need both exploratory and confirmatory approaches because ...
“Finding the question is often more important than finding the answer”.
Another key question now is whether exploratory analysis task should be (or not) worried or not about false alarms. In that sense, let me show you what political scientist and statistician Andrew Gelman of Columbia University in New York and author of one of the most renowned blogs on the matter says in this excellent article recently published in Nature magazine:
“… In this approach, exploratory and confirmatory analyses are approached differently and clearly labelled. … Researchers would first do two small exploratory studies and gather potentially interesting findings without worrying too much about false alarms. Then, on the basis of these results, the authors would decide exactly how they planned to confirm the findings.”
The exploratory analysis task should thus provide potential relationships and novel relevant questions that feed the classical confirmatory process focused on minimizing type II error, that is, failing to assert what is present, a miss.
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