Design research to illuminate or evaluate unquestioned assumptions in the literature.

Attempt to resolve or provide further evidence of one side of a controversy in the literature—perhaps demonstrate that the controversy was unfounded from the start.

Choose a hypothesis seen as important by scholars in the literature but for which no one has completed a systematic study.

Choose an accepted hypothesis in the literature that we suspect is false (or one we believe has not been adequately confirmed) and investigate whether it is indeed false or whether some other theory is correct.