Question

ASSIGNMENT - SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Qualitative and Quantitative Research: Briefly describe what is involved with both qualitative and quantitative research along with the strengths and limitations of each.

Answer 1

Qualitative research: It is a way to gain a deeper understanding of an event, organization or culture. This research method gives you a broad understanding of events, data about human groups, and broad patterns behind events and people. The main advantages and disadvantages associated with qualitative research are as follows:

Advantages:

• It’s useful for finding out more about complex situations.
• Data is based on the participant’s views of the world, rather than a world created by a researcher.
• Can be used to figure out how people interpret constructs like IQ or fear, which can be hard to quantify.

Disadvantages:

• Data usually can’t be generalized outside of your research.
• Predictions of future events are usually impossible to quantify
• Lower credibility than quantitative research.
• Data collection takes a lot longer than in a traditional lab setting.

Quantitative research: It is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical or computational techniques.The objective of quantitative research is to develop and employ mathematical models, theories and hypotheses pertaining to phenomena. The main advantages and disadvnatges associated with this research method are as follows:

Advantages:

• Allows the researcher to measure and analyze data.
• The relationship between an independent and dependent variable is studied in detail.
• Quantitative research can be used to test hypotheses in experiments because of its ability to measure data using statistics.

Disadvantages:

• The main disadvantage of quantitative research is the context of the study or experiment is ignored.
• Quantitative research does not study things in a natural setting or discuss the meaning things have for different people as qualitative research does.
• Another disadvantage is that a large sample of the population must be studied; the larger the sample of people researched, the more statistically accurate the results will be.