Compare and Contrast Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research Designs
During the collection and analysis of data, two main approaches are utilized, which include the quantitative research design and qualitative research design. Quantitative research design deals with statistics and numbers, while qualitative research design deals with meanings and words. Basically, quantitative research design will be expressed in the form of graphs and numbers and will be mainly used to confirm and test various assumptions and theories (Aspers & Corte, 2019). The quantitative research design can therefore be used to come up with generalizable Facts about a given research topic. They are different quantitative methods which include observations recorded as numbers experiments and various surveys that possess close-ended questions. In contrast, qualitative research will be expressed in words. Qualitative research will therefore be utilized to understand experiences, thoughts, or concepts related to certain social phenomena. Qualitative research allows the researcher to gather in-depth knowledge on various topics that might not be well understood. There are different types of qualitative methods, which include literature reviews and observations that will be described in words and open-ended questions (Ahmad et al., 2019). The main differences between qualitative and quantitative research are, therefore, that although qualitative research is used to explore ideas and formulate hypotheses and theories, quantitative research is mainly utilized to test certain hypotheses or theories (Ahmad et al., 2019). Quantitative research will also be analyzed through statistical and mathematical analysis, while qualitative research is analyzed by categorizing, summarizing, and interpreting.
An example of a qualitative research approach is, if one was to conduct an in-depth interview with students asking them open-ended questions such as what are the experiences in class? And how satisfied they are with their studies. On the other hand, an example of a quantitative research method would include surveying a large number of students in a university to rate the performance of their professors on a scale of 1 to 5.
References
Ahmad, S., Wasim, S., Irfan, S., Gogoi, S., Srivastava, A., & Farheen, Z. (2019). Qualitative v/s. Quantitative Research- A Summarized Review. Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine and Healthcare, 6(43), 2828–2832. https://doi.org/10.18410/jebmh/2019/587
Aspers, P., & Corte, U. (2019). What is Qualitative in Qualitative Research. Qualitative Sociology, 42(2), 139–160. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-019-9413-7
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