Exploratory research in sport and exercise science: Perceptions, challenges, and recommendations

Quantitative exploratory research implies a flexible examination of a dataset with the purpose of finding patterns, associations, and interactions between variables to help formulate a hypothesis, which should be severely tested in a future confirmatory study. In many fields, including sport and exercise science, exploratory research is not openly reported, a practice that leads to serious problems. At the same time, exploration is a crucial step in scientific knowledge generation, and a substantial proportion of studies will be exploratory in nature, or include both confirmatory and exploratory analyses. Using a flowchart, we review how data are typically collected and used, and we distinguish exploratory…