Qualitative and Quantitative Research and the Research Sources for Qualitative Research

Qualitative and Quantitative Research
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Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Research refers to the process of discovering and acquiring new knowledge. For instance, a researcher might come across theories that enable the individual to organize new information coherently and explain specific events that have taken place in the past so that one can predict what might happen in the upcoming years. The two primary types of research are qualitative and quantitative studies. In particular, qualitative research entails the behavioral or social science study that explores processes, which underlie human behaviors using various exploratory techniques or tools, such as case studies, surveys, ethnography, historical methods, and interviews (Salkind, 2018). In addition, it can help to determine the political, social, and cultural contexts in which human behaviors occur. A qualitative researcher is usually interested in the interviewee’s speech instead of the frequency of a specific occurrence. The paper distinguishes qualitative from quantitative research and examines several qualitative sources.
The primary objective of qualitative research is to examine human behaviors in the political, cultural, and social contexts that they take place. For a researcher to achieve the purpose, the person might use various tools, including case studies, interviews, ethnography, and historical methods. Qualitative research is unique and is different from other types of studies, such as quantitative research. Notably, it helps in developing a hypothesis. In most cases, qualitative research answers the question “why,” which explains the reason it uses literature reviews to get credible information. The responses of the qualitative research are biased and undetermined. Since it does not involve statistical analysis, the study’s outcomes comprise narratives. Qualitative research is content dependent and has low generalizability (Salkind, 2018). The researcher obtains information by summarizing the information from other sources and interpreting them based on the research question. Qualitative research has a few participants, and open-ended questions are commonly used. As such, it uses non-numerical data to provide a proper understanding of how individuals behave in social, cultural, or political contexts.
In contrast, quantitative research involves gathering and analyzing numerical data. In that light, it is different from a qualitative study that deals with non-numerical data. The purpose of quantitative research is to test a hypothesis. Responses are unbiased, predetermined, and objective (Salkind, 2018). Statistical analysis is performed to determine the frequency of a specific occurrence. In quantitative research, data can be collected using polls, experiments, questionnaires, surveys, interviews, and longitudinal studies. Researchers are more interested in the frequency of occurrence of certain events. After data collection, analysis using various statistical tools, such as SPSS, is done. The analyzed data is interpreted to get the meaning. At this juncture, the researcher might express the data using graphs, charts, ...