Qualitative vs Quantitative Research

Qualitative vs. Quantitative In this paper I will be explaining the differences between qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research will help you learn about individuals experiences of emotion and behavior, and explains human behavior into detail. Whereas quantitative research will be in hard numbers, it will provide you with data and is the most common method of research.

Qualitative research should, in my opinion, be the most common method of research due to the fact that it focuses on certain individuals with fewer restrictions; the individuals are able to provide data in their own words with subjective information.

The researchers could ask the participants about how their life has been so far, or how they think they did in school, and they would respond in their own way, with no numbers, just their own words. Qualitative can also explore new areas of research and build new theories because they ask for people’s opinions.

The downside to qualitative research is that it’s difficult to test its hypotheses and theories with large groups.

This method of research is only supposed to target smaller, more convenient groups, which is good if that’s your goal but bad if, let’s say, you wanted to find out the percentage of how many people are happy with their lives. With qualitative its very time consuming, unless you have the time for it, but if you don’t then quantitative research might be what you want. There are different methods of qualitative research, such as the action method.

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What Is Qulitative Research

Action research tries to understand the concerns of people and immediate problem situations. The second one, the case study, is the most common method within the qualitative research. It considers the phenomenon within its real life context. They study many of the different aspects of people. The process of qualitative research is fairly simple, you have to find which questions you want to ask your subjects and collect the relevant data from them and find out how to interpret it, and lastly you just have to write up our findings and conclusions. Quantitative research is what you will most likely come in contact with, in school, at work, in the store, etc. it’s mostly population focused like how on some maps it shows the percentage of different races in each state, and that’s due to quantitative research. Tables, graphs, and other figures would be needed to write out your findings to understand what you tested people or populations on, most of them will be in hard numbers with no explanations.

Its most commonly used in politics, like for presidential elections for each state and then all is brought together in the end to eventually find out who the new president would be and has the highest credibility with people in power. You can ask your subjects to provide data about themselves such as age, number of people in their families, what their address is, basically anything to do with hard numbers or statistics. Even though it has the highest ratings for research and its most commonly used, it does have its weaknesses.

Like, for instance, the knowledge produced by researchers might be too abstract and they could be missing out on the phenomenon by collecting a much narrower data set with being limited to just numbers. Even though quantitative research is the most widely known method of research, it still has some holes in the research that can only be filled by qualitative research. Like within the statistics of quantitative can also be an explanation on how you’ve accumulated your research or you can go into detail about the numbers and what your opinion would be.