“Make it empirical, not just a literature review.” Comments of that kind come back on a lot of dissertation proposals, and most students then go looking for what the word actually means. Fair enough: empirical is used constantly at university and explained almost never.
Empirical means “based on experience”. A statement or a piece of work is empirical when it rests on systematically collected observations of the real world, that is on data from surveys, observation, experiments or content analysis, rather than on reasoning, logic or the existing literature alone. By the end of this article one question will be enough to place your own project.
📌 The key points
- Empirical means gathered from observation, not from reasoning.
- Empiricism is a philosophical position, empirical a property.
- The word goes back to Greek peîra, meaning “trial”.
- Qualitative interviews are empirical too.
- Empirically supported is not the same as proven.
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What “empirical” means
Empirical describes knowledge that comes from observing the world rather than from thinking about it. Collins English Dictionary defines it as “derived from or relating to experiment and observation rather than theory”, and adds a second sense from philosophy: a proposition is empirical when it is subject, at least theoretically, to verification.
The word doing the quiet work in that definition is “derived”. Having experienced something does not yet give you an empirical finding. What turns experience into evidence is the procedure around it: a defined selection of cases, a consistent way of collecting, a documented analysis. Three conversations in the library are an impression. Two hundred completed questionnaires are a result.
Official statistics show what that looks like at scale. The Office for National Statistics describes the Labour Force Survey as the largest household study in the UK and as the source of the official measures of employment and unemployment, collected face to face and over the telephone. Selection, method and limitations are published, which is precisely why the figures can be used.
The routes to such data are few. In empirical social research there are four: participant or non-participant observation, the experiment, the written or spoken survey, and content analysis. Anything gathered that way and then analysed systematically counts as empirical material, and the steps together make up the process set out in the guide to empirical research.
Empirical, empiricism and empiric: three words, one root
Empirical, empiricism and empiric share a root but mean three different things: a property, a philosophical position and, in older usage, a person. In everyday speech they blur together, and in a dissertation that shows.
| Word | What it refers to | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
| empirical | the property of coming from observation | “There is empirical evidence for this.” |
| empiricism | a position in the theory of knowledge | “Locke belongs to British empiricism.” |
| empiric | older term for a practitioner without formal training | “He was dismissed as a mere empiric.” |
British empiricism is the narrowest of the three and the one with a genuinely local history. John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume argued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that knowledge grows out of sense experience rather than out of innate ideas, and their opposite number was rationalism, which puts reason in that place. The label “British empiricism” still marks that tradition in reading lists today.
The practical upshot for your own work is a relief. Doing empirical research is a method, not a creed. Nobody expects you to defend empiricism as a philosophy just because you sent out a questionnaire.
Where the word “empirical” comes from
Empirical goes back to the Greek émpeiros, “experienced, skilled”, which contains peîra, the word for “trial” and “experience”. Read literally, empirical means something close to “being within experience”, and the Latin form empiricus carried it into English.
What happened next is the interesting part. In Latin the word applied to one group only: doctors, and specifically the members of an ancient school of medicine that accepted experience alone as the basis of treatment, in reaction to an over-reliance on theory. For a long time that was not a compliment. Collins still records the medical sense as treatment “based on practical experience rather than scientific proof”, and the noun empiric long served as a polite way of calling someone a quack.
Only from the second half of the eighteenth century did empirical settle into philosophy and the language of science as a neutral technical term. The valuation has since turned right around. What was once a charge of having no learning is now the mark of knowledge you can lean on.
Empirical was once the accusation that you had experience and no theory. Today it is the compliment that you have more than theory.
How to tell whether a statement is empirical
A statement is empirical when you can say which observation would overturn it. If that question has no answer, what you have is a definition, a value judgement or a piece of logic, but not an empirical claim.
The test needs no specialist knowledge. Take a sentence, picture a world in which it is false, and ask how you would notice. If something concrete comes to mind, the sentence can be checked against reality.
| Statement | Empirical? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| “62 per cent of respondents commute by train.” | yes | a count could contradict the figure |
| “A questionnaire is an instrument for collecting data.” | no | a definition, not an observation |
| “Tuition fees are unfair.” | no | a value judgement, not measurable |
| “Students who work part-time take longer to graduate.” | yes | an analysis could show the opposite |
The third row is the instructive one. “Tuition fees are unfair” cannot be measured, whereas “73 per cent of students consider tuition fees unfair” certainly can. The judgement itself sits outside empirical research, while how widely it is shared is an ordinary empirical question. A great many research questions fail at exactly this point, and the same rewrite rescues them.
💡 Tip
Put “how many”, “how often” or “to what extent” in front of your research question as a test. If the sentence still makes sense, the question can be answered empirically. If it sounds absurd, you need either different data or a different question.
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Empirical or theoretical: what it means for your dissertation
Your dissertation is empirical once you collect your own data or analyse existing raw data yourself. It stays theoretical as long as you review the state of research, clarify concepts or set positions against each other without collecting anything.
The literature review is where the argument usually starts. Pulling together twenty studies and reporting their results means working with empirical material, not working empirically. It becomes an empirical study only once the studies are selected against fixed criteria, coded and compared systematically, as in a systematic review. The same holds for statistics: quoting a figure from the ONS is desk research, analysing an official dataset yourself is empirical work.
| Approach | Empirical? | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| Your own online survey with 150 responses | yes | methodology and findings |
| Six interviews, transcribed and coded | yes | methodology and analysis |
| A summary of twenty studies | no | literature review |
| A comparison of two theories | no | theoretical chapter |
Whether numbers come out at the end makes no difference to the label. Six transcribed interviews are as empirical as a survey with 500 responses, because both rest on data that was collected. What remains contested in the social sciences is what may count as experience at all: only what can be measured and counted, or also what resists being pinned to a number. What follows from that for your choice of method is set out in the article on qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Three mix-ups that show up in the methodology chapter
Three misunderstandings appear around the word empirical again and again, and each rests on an equation that looks plausible at first. In a methodology chapter they matter, because that is where you justify what you did.
One question finds all three when you proofread: am I talking about where my data came from, or about something else that merely sounds similar?
Empirical is not the same as quantitative
Where the data came from and what form it takes are two separate matters. Eight coded interviews come from a collection process and are therefore empirical, even though the analysis contains not a single percentage. A literature review, on the other hand, does not become empirical by arranging other people’s figures into a tidy table. Treating the two as one leads you to justify the wrong decision.
Supported and proven are different words
An empirical finding is provisional: it holds until new observations speak against it. Academic writing is cautious for that reason, with phrasings such as “the data support the assumption” or “the results suggest”. That caution is craft, not hedging. Why an inference from single cases to a general rule is never compelling is explained in the article on induction and deduction.
Empirical does not yet mean representative
A study can be impeccably empirical and still apply to almost nobody. Collecting 300 responses through your own Instagram story produces real data, but a selection that reflects your own contacts. Empirical says that data was collected, representative says who the figures speak for. Where the line runs is explained in the article on the representative survey.
Conclusion
Empirical is not a mark of quality but a statement about where the data came from. What matters in your own work is therefore not whether it is empirical enough, but whether you can say in two sentences where your claims come from, how you collected them and who they apply to. Everything else, from sampling to analysis, is built on those two sentences!
Where to go next
- Want the whole process? Empirical research: definition, methods, guide
- Planning an empirical dissertation? Writing an empirical dissertation
- Looking for the individual stages? The empirical research process
- Wondering how large your sample needs to be? The sample
The theory is ready, the data are missing?
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