Introduction:
Before starting any research, you always ask yourself, “is your research project quantitative or qualitative?” Although applications of both quantitative and qualitative research methods overlap, there are still many differences between these two methods. The qualitative method will use descriptive and non-numerical data, and the quantitative method will use numerical data. There is a huge debate in scientific communities over quantitative and qualitative methods and which one is the best method. Because of this, you often get confused choosing which research method would be best for your study. This article will help you solve this problem by giving significant pros and cons of using qualitative research over quantitative research.
What are qualitative research and quantitative research?
Before discussing the pros and cons of qualitative research over quantitative research, it would be best to understand the concept of qualitative and quantitative research.
Qualitative research:
This research is usually conveyed through words. It is useful to understand experiences, thoughts, or concepts. Such research will enable you to collect deep insights into the research questions and topic.
Data for qualitative research is usually collected through interviews, surveys with open-ended questions, literature reviews on the research topic, theories and observations. Most of researchers feel it difficult and therefore, they get PhD dissertation help from best writers.
Quantitative Research:
For quantitative research, you use graphs and numbers. This type of research is useful to confirm or test assumptions and theories based on your topic. It helps in providing relevant facts and figures related to the research topic.
Data for quantitative research is usually collected by surveys with closed-ended questions, numbers, and experiments.
The table below shows the key differences between both types of research:
| Quantitative Research | Qualitative Research |
| Tests theories and assumptions | Explores ideas and formulates a hypothesis |
| Use statistical analysis and math | Conducts the analysis by summarizing and interpreting the data |
| Expressed in graphs, numbers and tables | Use words to express |
| It needs many respondents | It needs a few respondents |
| Closed-ended questions | Open-ended questions, interviews |
Pros and cons of qualitative research:
Pros:
Following are the pros of qualitative research over quantitative research:
- It gives you content that is more useful for practical applications. This type of research helps social scientists to understand the social structure of life in a better way. It can help you produce such content that can be useful in practical applications of human lives. You can use this research to solve real issues of human lives.
- It gives you a more in-depth exploration of a topic than quantitative research. You are not bound by the restraints of qualitative research in this. You can get better information from qualitative data for the research than from quantitative data. It is because numbers in quantitative research alone cannot leave everything.
- Qualitative data collection methods encourage discussion as they are more open and do not sticky follow some fixed questions. This can help you to get more information on the topic.
- You can complete qualitative research more rapidly. It is because the sample size is smaller than the quantitative research method. This way, the researcher can collect that quickly and create faster results for the research.
- You can develop better insights with this research method. Humans are complex. Therefore, using words to describe their daily life issues is better than using numbers. Qualitative data can help discover better insights to solve issues that everyone faces. This method offers you a great opportunity to properly understand human behavior and things that are going on daily.
- The qualitative research method is cheaper than quantitative research. It is because it is a very simple data collection method, and you need only a few participants for data.
- This method is also very flexible in terms of timing and location as you do not have to take interviews of many participants for data collection.
Cons:
Following are the cons of qualitative research over quantitative research:
- The main disadvantage of this research is that it cannot quantify the data collected. This makes this research very hard for you to make any vital statistics on your topic. This research method does not care about statistics or percentages. Therefore, it can be very hard to apply the findings of this research to the general public.
- To do this research, the researcher must have proper knowledge of the research topic. You can only get good advantages from this research method if you have expertise related to the relevant industry. If you are not familiar with the related research subject, you cannot get proper answers from interviews required for strong results. You cannot correctly interpret the data in your research without the proper knowledge.
- Another disadvantage is the ability of this research method to create a potential bias. This method has less ability to probe answers. The answers of participants you will get from the interview may not apply to the public in general.
- You need to find out unspoken points from the data in this research. The researcher must connect all the dots after collecting information through interviews. While collecting data, he must understand the circumstances, read cues and have empathetic responses. Without this, he could lead to a false conclusion or incomplete result.
- It sometimes requires making repetitive efforts for data collection. This method uses a small sample size that cannot always represent the whole demographic. Therefore, you might need many follow-up interviews to ensure results accuracy.
- This method does not give you data rigidity. Qualitative data usually represents common grounds that the targeted population of research shares. Therefore using this method, it becomes very hard to pinpoint specific information and produce meaningful results.
Conclusion:
The pros and cons of qualitative research over quantitative research can help you choose the right research method. The qualitative method is perfect for better insights and in-depth exploration of human behaviour. Because, unlike quantitative research, the qualitative method produces rich information which can be used in practical application in everyday human lives. However, if you want rigid data that can apply to the public in general, this method may not be the best option for you.
Author Bio:
Robert Fawl is a professional Content Writer based in London, UK. He is an author and blogger with experience in writing different academic assignments. If you need assignment writing services to write your assignment, you can contact him.