Empirical Social Research: Definition and Methods

Every year since 1983, with two gaps in 1988 and 1992, the same survey has asked people across the UK what they think about work, family, tax and the state. British Social Attitudes is run by the National Centre for Social Research, and the 43rd round alone gathered 4,680 fully completed interviews.

That run of more than forty years is what makes the series useful. A single poll tells you what people said in one week. A repeated survey with the same wording tells you whether an attitude has genuinely shifted, or whether only the coverage of it has, and that distinction is the whole point of the discipline.

Empirical social research is the systematic study of social reality using data that is either collected for the purpose or drawn from existing holdings. It tests theoretical assumptions about human behaviour against observable facts rather than argument alone, and it does so through surveys, observation, content analysis and experiments. By the end of this article you will know how to set up your own study, whether you need to collect data at all, and what UK data protection law expects before you ask your first question.

📌 Key points at a glance

• Empirical social research tests assumptions about social behaviour against collected data.
• Asking, observing, analysing content and experimenting are the four routes to data.
• British Social Attitudes has run since 1983, almost every year.
• The UK Data Service lets you register with your institutional login.
• UK GDPR Chapter 8A has covered research safeguards since February 2026.

What is empirical social research?

Empirical social research is the branch of the social sciences that derives its statements about how people live together from systematically collected data rather than from theory alone. It is at home in sociology, psychology, politics, education studies and communication research.

The word itself explains half of it. “Empirical” reaches English through the Latin empiricus from the ancient Greek empeiria, knowledge gained by trial and practice. In research it covers anything that can be counted, measured, observed or asked about. A piece of work is therefore not empirical because it contains numbers. It is empirical because its answer comes from data instead of from a chain of reasoning.

The second word carries just as much weight. Systematic means that the selection of respondents, the wording of the questions, the timing of the fieldwork and the rules for analysis are fixed in advance and written down. A conversation in the pub also produces experience, but nobody else can retrace it. That is exactly the point: intersubjective verifiability. Critical rationalism sharpens that further and asks that an assumption could fail against reality.

Leeds Beckett University frames the same point one level up, treating research design as the overall framework and the methods as the tools inside it. Deciding the framework first saves you from choosing a method that cannot answer your question. How empirical social research relates to its parent term is covered in the article on empirical research as a whole.

Our reading tip: Michael Häder (2019): Empirische Sozialforschung. Eine Einführung. 4th edition, Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 530 pages (SpringerLink). The German-language standard introduction, and the fourth edition is strong exactly where older textbooks stop: it was expanded to cover digital collection methods, river sampling, research ethics and data protection.

Basic or applied research: which one suits your project?

Basic research looks for general relationships, applied research for an answer to one specific case. Both use the same methods and differ only in their goal, but for a dissertation the distinction has very practical consequences: it decides whether your project fits into a single term.

Take an example from local government. The basic question would be which factors explain turnout at local elections in general. The applied question would be why one particular council ward has seen turnout fall for five years running. The second question is the smaller one, and for a dissertation it is almost always the wiser one.

Action research in the third row deserves a closer look, because plenty of student guides file it in the wrong place. You will often read that action research is simply an older name for applied research. That is not the case. Action research goes back to Kurt Lewin in the 1940s and describes something of its own: researchers and participants define the problem and the goal together, after which intervention in the field and academic evaluation interlock in a spiral (Spektrum, Lexikon der Psychologie). Treating the two as synonyms means promising a level of participation in your proposal that you never intended to deliver.

The seven steps of an empirical social study

An empirical social study runs through seven steps, from the research question through hypotheses, operationalisation and sampling to fieldwork, analysis and dissemination. The order is not a formality. It is the reason someone can later retrace how you arrived at your result.

How much weight each step carries depends on the topic. A standardised online survey spends most of its time on step 3, an interview study on step 6. None of them gets skipped.

1. Research question and aim. What exactly do you want to know and what limits do time, access and your course regulations impose? The article on the empirical research process takes this step apart in detail.
2. Theory and hypotheses. What explanation does the literature already offer and how do you turn it into a statement that your data could contradict?
3. Operationalisation. How do you make a concept such as “social support” measurable? Without this step, no question in your questionnaire will match the hypothesis.
4. Selecting the units of analysis. Who do you ask, how many and by what procedure? The routes are set out in the article on the sample.
5. Pilot and fieldwork. First a trial run with a handful of people, then the real thing. The pilot costs almost nothing and is still the first casualty of a tight schedule.
6. Preparation and analysis. Coding, cleaning, transcribing, then either calculating or interpreting.
7. Interpretation and dissemination (= getting the findings out). What follows from the numbers or the quotations and how do you make the result available to others?

A similar sequence holds up the textbooks. Häder organises his by study planning, sampling procedures, collection methods, pretests, preparation and analysis, and documentation. If your methodology chapter follows that run, half of the structure is already in place.

Which methods does empirical social research use?

Empirical social research takes four routes to data: asking, observing, content analysis and the experiment. The first three are ways of collecting, the experiment is the arrangement in which they are used. Whether a study turns out quantitative or qualitative depends above all on the degree of standardisation.

Which one fits follows from what your question is actually about. If it concerns attitudes, you have to ask. If it concerns real behaviour, observation is usually more honest, because people judge their own conduct poorly. If it concerns public communication, the material already exists and is waiting for a content analysis.

One error clings to asking and it costs marks in a viva: survey and interview get treated as the same thing, or the interview is filed wholesale under qualitative methods. Neither holds. Asking covers both the standardised survey and the open interview, in writing, by telephone or online. What decides the label is the degree of standardisation: five semi-structured interviews and an online survey with 600 respondents both belong to the same family of methods.

Keep collection and analysis apart as well. The method you use to obtain data and the procedure you use to analyse it are two separate decisions. Which combinations are common is set out in the article on qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Empirical social research without collecting your own data

An empirical project does not need data you collected yourself, because secondary analysis of existing datasets is an accepted approach in empirical social research. For students in the UK it is often the faster route, since recruiting a usable sample eats more time than the entire analysis.

The main address is the UK Data Service, the principal repository for economic, population and social research data, run by the University of Essex, the University of Manchester, Jisc and UCL with funding from the ESRC. Registration works through your own institution: you sign in with the username and password your university already gave you (UK Data Service, registration FAQs). One limit is worth knowing early: some collections are not available to users outside the UK.

British Social Attitudes is held there too. Run by NatCen since 1983 and fielded every year apart from 1988 and 1992, it gathered 4,680 completed interviews in its 43rd round (NatCen, British Social Attitudes).

Empirical means the answer comes from data. It does not mean the data has to come from you.

The honest limit of secondary analysis is fit. Somebody else's dataset answers your question only if that somebody happened to measure the right things. The search therefore runs the other way round: first look at which variables exist, then sharpen your question against them. Where the empirical part sits in your structure is covered in the article on the empirical dissertation.

💡 Tip

Settle the question of fit before you register your topic. Open the variable list of the most recent British Social Attitudes round on the UK Data Service and search it for two terms from your research question. Find both and your data basis is there.

Data protection and research ethics: what to settle first

Anyone who surveys or observes people for a study is processing personal data and needs a lawful basis under Article 6 UK GDPR. At university that is usually the participant's freely given consent, obtained before the first question.

The specific research rules changed recently and most student guides have not caught up. Until early 2026 they sat in section 19 of the Data Protection Act 2018. That section was removed on 5 February 2026 and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 put a new Chapter 8A into the UK GDPR in its place, Articles 84A to 84D (Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, section 86). Research, archiving and statistics are now grouped as “RAS purposes” and must be carried out subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of the data subject.

What to put in place before you start

Five items cover the ground for a student project, and all five belong in the file before the first invitation goes out. Each one also gives you a sentence for your methodology chapter, so the effort pays twice.

• A consent form naming the purpose, the retention period and withdrawal.
• A data minimisation check: which question do you genuinely need?
• Separate storage for identifiers and for answers.
• A deletion date written into the consent text.
• A word with your supervisor about ethical approval.

Ethical approval at UK universities

Ethical approval in the UK sits with the university rather than a national body, and almost every institution requires it for research involving human participants, undergraduate projects included. Approval has to come before any data is collected. Your own university's procedure overrides any general rule, so ask your supervisor and your faculty research ethics committee.

⚠️ Careful

A verbatim interview quotation in your appendix is a disclosure of personal data. Unless your consent form covers exactly that, you have no basis for it. Build permission to quote into the consent text from the start rather than chasing it afterwards.

Which wording belongs in a consent text is set out in the article on data protection in surveys. This section explains the position and is not legal advice.

Common mistakes in empirical social research

Most of the weaknesses in student projects do not arise during the analysis. They arise long before it, in decisions nobody wrote down, and they only surface once the data is in and nothing can be changed.

Four of them come up again and again. All four are avoidable, and each costs a few hours of thinking beforehand instead of several weeks of repair afterwards.

Confusing representativeness with sample size

A survey does not become representative because a lot of people take part. Representativeness is a property of the selection procedure: it arises when every member of the population had a known and non-zero chance of ending up in the sample. Eight hundred responses from your own contacts therefore say less than three hundred from a random selection. How to phrase this properly is covered in the article on when a survey is representative.

Writing the hypothesis after the analysis

Running the numbers first and then adjusting the hypothesis to match reverses the logic of research. The finding can no longer be tested, because it comes from the same data that is meant to support it. Write your hypotheses down before fieldwork and leave them standing even if they are not confirmed. A rejected hypothesis is a result, not an accident.

Choosing the method before the question

“I'll run a survey” is a habit rather than a research decision. The sensible order is the reverse: the question first, then the kind of data that could answer it, then the method that produces that kind of data. Start with the method and you will reliably collect data that misses the topic, and you will notice while writing up your findings.

Dropping the pilot study

The pilot is the step most often sacrificed to the timetable and the only one you cannot catch up on later. Five people from your target group reading the questionnaire aloud will reliably find the ambiguous item, the double negative and the missing answer option. Once it has gone out to 400 people, none of that can be fixed.

Conclusion

Empirical social research is less a collection of techniques than a chain of decisions you take in advance and justify afterwards. Choose the question first, then the kind of data, and only then the method. And check early whether the right data already exists somewhere, because a sound secondary analysis beats a weak collection of your own every time.

Where to go next

• Want the whole framework? Fundamentals of empirical research
• Your study design is still open? Developing a research design
• Unsure whether your study describes or explains? Exploratory, descriptive, explanatory, causal
• Need the empirical part to fit your structure? Writing an empirical dissertation
• Data collected and looking for the right procedure? Choosing data analysis methods

Collecting the data yourself after all?

With empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you can set up your survey on the free plan, keep the responses hosted in the EU and get the data processing agreement at no extra cost.

Create a survey for free