Marketing is mostly related to satisfying the needs of the customer and getting feedback of customer satisfaction . Needs , wants and motives have a close relationship with behavior of the customer. While needs , wants and motives are invisible and lie deep within the person , behavior is to a great extent visible to others in the form of actions or sometimes no action . In this situation , is it advisable to capture reliable and valid data from customers through qualitative research than depend too much on quantitative techniques. Mixed method is also a option available .
Hi A.H,
The answer to this question is that it's not a case of which paradigm (including mixed methods) is better than another. At the end of the day - the only sensible answer is - you should only choose the paradigm, methodology, framework, method/design that best suits the need of the task of what you want to achieve.
Dean's answer is a nice summary - start with the question / task and the method will flow from that. However, many questions will allow the researcher to employ a range of possible methods and often the wording of aims or hypotheses will be altered to allow one method to be used over another. Some factors to consider when considering qualitative vs quantitative are: the level of detail you want; whether or not you already have a good understanding (and ways to measure) specific phenomena; the degree to which your study is exploratory; the extent to which you wish to generalise.
Both Dean and Jason make good points regarding process and rationale for selection. I might add the following: Your comments after the initial question (in bold print) that the actual behavior(s) (rather than the internalized motives and drives) are overt and therefore easier to collect and count is true. However, this only leads to prediction of the likely occurrence of those behaviors from your selected sample to a potential universe of other consumers. While that might be exactly what you want, it will not provide you with any data relating to the why or why not consumers choose the enact the behaviors you seek to understand. An advantage of qualitative methods is that you can delve deeper into the rationale behind the behaviors since you can better derive the consumers' intentions and reasons for the overt behaviors. Additionally, you can better evaluate the behaviors within their authentic contexts....to create a thick description. To predict the likelihood of specific consumer behaviors, go quantitative...to try and understand the reasons why, go qualitative...either separately or in a mixed methods design.
Ultimately, it is always going to be difficult to predict behaviors from attitudes, regardless of whether you study those attitudes either qualitatively or quantitatively. The problem is that most behavior are complex and often context-dependent, so a great many different influences can be relevant, including a wide range of different attitudes.
Many thanks Dean, Jason, Jack and David for sharing your opinions .
Do you feel qualitative research is better than quantitative research in prediction of human behavior in a specific area such as marketing ?
Not really - what research method i.e. quantitative, qualitative or mixed method research to adopt is depending on your research problem & research objective.
E.g. based on your rigorous literature review, you have some constructs / variables in mind & want to predict their relationships or cause & effect, then perhaps you can perform a quantitative research (e.g. correlational study or experimental study).
On the contrary, if your research on certain constructs / phenomena lead to discovery of other new phenomena / observations - then this can be a form of qualitative research.
Likewise to adopt different types of design e.g. sequential explanatory, sequential exploratory, concurrent triangulation etc. within mixed method research also driven by your research problem & objective.
