[1] The characteristics used to describe the situation or population are usually some kind of categorical scheme also known as descriptive categories.
Scientists use knowledge about the nature of electrons, protons and neutrons to devise this categorical scheme.
Often the best approach, prior to writing descriptive research, is to conduct a survey investigation.
The main objective of this type of research is to describe the data and characteristics of what is being studied.
The idea behind this type of research is to study frequencies, averages, and other statistical calculations.
[3] David A. Grimaldi and Michael S. Engel suggest that descriptive science in biology is currently undervalued and misunderstood: "Descriptive" in science is a pejorative, almost always preceded by "merely," and typically applied to the array of classical -ologies and -omies: anatomy, archaeology, astronomy, embryology, morphology, paleontology, taxonomy, botany, cartography, stratigraphy, and the various disciplines of zoology, to name a few.
[4]A negative attitude by scientists toward descriptive science is not limited to biological disciplines: Lord Rutherford's notorious quote, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting," displays a clear negative attitude about descriptive science, and it is known that he was dismissive of astronomy, which at the beginning of the 20th century was still gathering largely descriptive data about stars, nebulae, and galaxies, and was only beginning to develop a satisfactory integration of these observations within the framework of physical law, a cornerstone of the philosophy of physics.