“To explore” or the power of small words in social research

It’s interesting how the notion of “exploration” or “to explore”, beyond any formal or agreed definition, has gained a privileged position within qualitative research. Other notions such as “to understand” or “to describe” somehow fail to express the specific ethos of the qualitative endeavor. On the one hand, exploration seems to point to an initial examination of a relatively unknown situation or phenomena, a clarifying stage in a continuum that ends with a proper search for explanation and causality. But the idea seems to have gained a level of autonomy regarding this continuum. Decades of mistrust against realism warns us against a naïve conception of social reality as a series of circumscribed objects out there, and as social research as a form of legitimate access to them. In front of this the idea of “exploration” seems to suggest a reflexive process, one that is open to change, and, somehow, open to the essential openness and ongoing-ness of social reality.