Related to: Map and Territory.

This post is based on ideas that came to be during my second-year nursing Research Methods class. The fact that I did terribly in this class maybe indicates that I shouldn’t be trying to explain it to anyone, but it also has a lot to do with the way I zoned out for most of every class, mulling over the material that would later become this post.

Types of map: the level of abstraction, or ‘how many steps away from reality’?

Probably in the third or fourth Research Methods class, we learned that any given research proposal could be divided into one of the following four categories:

• Descriptive
• Exploratory
• Explanatory
• Predictive