A researcher should understand the research problem before he/she starts working on the same. qualitative understanding gives more insight and therefore would suggest the correct research methodology. What is your opinion about it?
Qualitative research is appropriate for different types of questions
Understanding something in its context has elements of empathy, not in the psychological sense as intuitive and non-conscious feeling, but as reflective reconstruction, interpretation of the action of others and social scientists should be concerned with the interpretive understanding of human beings.
Qualitative methodology is not completely precise, because human beings do not always act logically or predictably. Investigators in qualitative inquiry turn to the human participants for guidance, control and direction throughout the research. Structure and order are, of course, important for the research to be scientific.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/9780632052844/001-025%5B1%5D.pdf
Qualitative research is appropriate for different types of questions
Understanding something in its context has elements of empathy, not in the psychological sense as intuitive and non-conscious feeling, but as reflective reconstruction, interpretation of the action of others and social scientists should be concerned with the interpretive understanding of human beings.
Qualitative methodology is not completely precise, because human beings do not always act logically or predictably. Investigators in qualitative inquiry turn to the human participants for guidance, control and direction throughout the research. Structure and order are, of course, important for the research to be scientific.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/9780632052844/001-025%5B1%5D.pdf
Dear Anup,
Thank you for essential question. I supose many paradigm wars around the world were based on this issue you highllighted. How important is qualitative understanding of research problems? - I would answer - It is crucial and gives deepend insight, as you also mentioned above. Quantitative research gives verifications and measures.
You put the question using the phrases and rhetoric from qualitative research, so I suppose you mean the confirmation of logical continuity of the proceedings which researcher is choosing as qualitative strategies. I agree with that. I will say even more, I believe that scholars such as for ex. in the social sciences (my land) are initially predisposed to certain research approaches, even though they may properly fulfill both options both quantitative and qualitative. Researchers are some. That entanglement is related to the type of mentality of the researcher and gives preference to data driven research, images, words, contributing to the area or to the desk researches and numbers.
Dear Anup, there can be understandings of qualitative researches as giving opportunities to field discoveries (as in ethnographic research, etc.). Besides as openning options for future implementation of social changes (as in action research in my discipline). Understandings of problems meant as collecting and interpreting the data in a smal purposive samples (as in case studies) can be also an introduction of problems later undertaken by researchers in the different apporaches and paradigms. Qualitative research, (like quantitative too) have their limitations which are bases to critics as: time consuming, small purposive samples, etc. they as you said give understandings the research problems what is important as well as counting. I hope I ansewered your question.
Dear friends, nowadays a lot of our research involve both qualitative and quantitative (or MIXED) methods. We are more concerned to explain our data in some depth, than just show its statistical significance.
'Quantitative research employs numerical indicators to ascertain the relative size of a particular communication phenomenon. The second type of investigation process is qualitative research, which employs symbols and words to indicate the presence or absence of phenomena or categorize them into different types. Quantitative and qualitative observations provide intercultural researchers with different ways of operationalizing and measuring theoretical constructs and practical concepts. While quantitative methods can provide a high level of measurement precision and statistical power, qualitative methods can supply a greater depth of information about the nature of communication processes in a particular research setting.'
http://www.russcomm.ru/eng/rca_biblio/m/matveev01_eng.shtml
http://betterevaluation.org/plan/describe/combining_qualitative_and_quantitative_data
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=icwdmeea
Qualitative research relates to understanding some aspect of social life, and researchers are more familiar with quantitative methods, which aim to measure variables.
>>Qualitative research methods originated in the social and behavioral sciences: sociology, anthropology and psychology. Today, qualitative methods in the field of marketing research include in-depth interviews with individuals, group discussions (from two to ten participants is typical); diary and journal exercises; and in-context observations. Sessions may be conducted in person, by telephone, via videoconferencing and via the Internet>>.
More information you may find by lookin at the following link:
http://www.qrca.org/?page=whatisqualresearch
Dear Dr Anup, This is an important question. Qualitative research helps revealing a range of behaviour of a target audience in relation to a issue/topic. It involves using in-depth studies of people in small groups of people to test hypotheses. It generally results in descriptive rather than predictive formulations. It is more helpful in the following ways: .
--More active engagement of respondents than is possible in more structured survey, which help grasping the nuances of the problems/issues.
--Helps the researcher to reach beyond initial responses and rationales.
--Helps to observe, note down and interpret non-verbal communication, which can provide important clues in validating the responses and during data analysis.
--The opportunity to engage respondents for getting considered opinions that may not be possible in surveys.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Analysis conducted on small samples to understand the deep reasons underlying the phenomena.
No claim of representativeness in the statistical sense
Used to delimit the field
They are used to discriminate the main variables involved
We need to understand "what's the problem"
Often enough, other times they are followed by the quantitative
They are normally guided by professional psychologists (watch out for amateurs!)
They can be individual interviews or group
The method is the interview "free" in depth
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
Describe in quantitative terms (large sample) certain phenomena.
They claim representativeness in the statistical sense close
They are used to quantify the phenomena
They are used to "weigh" the main variables involved
They are used to discriminate the factors prevalent than marginal
They are usually prepared by professional researchers after the signs of professional psychologists
It is normally used a structured questionnaire and default
It is administered by interviewers (but also amateur "formats")
In a general sense (I believe) qualitative means describing a phenomenon with qualities, features or traits. It involves using linguistic terms, as opposed to numbers.
Such descriptions are often vague, uncertain or fuzzy. However, both approaches can be combined giving surprisingly relaible and robust results, e.g. fuzzy logic uses qualitative rules encoded with lingusitic terms, which combined with fuziification, defuzzification steps give quantitative results.
Qualitative descriptions are easier to communicate and apprehend. "Men that buy diapers buy also beer" is more appealing, than, e.g. "37% of male clients, who spent 12$ on diapers, spent 7$ on beer." Usually, it is expected that such data mining result will be explained in a qualitative model. Very often, it is also expected that qualitative hypotheses will be supported or falsified by quantitative research.
Distinction between qualitative and quantitative is sometimes difficult. A good example is Temporal Logic. It does not use quantitative notion of time. But drilling deeper, "always" and "eventually" operators are backed up by universal and existential quantifiers, hence TL is rather quantitative, but focused on particular fetures: precedence and succession of states.
Cause and effect relation is a very basic concept in understanding a system. What we need to know first that the 'happened before' relationship between the two events viz., the cause and the effect. Exact instants of these happenings may not be that important during the formulation of the problem.
Unambiguous understanding of subjective sense of the question to be answered through a research, intended actions, orientation to the principles and social contexts are vital for proper execution and success of a research programme. The focus should be on using specific definitions and carefully operationalizing what particular concepts and variables mean. Qualitative research provide more emphasis on interpretation and providing end-users with complete views, looking at contexts, environmental interests and a depth of understanding of concepts.
Qualitative research design should encompass the following
- Inquiry procedure
- Grounded theory
- Biography
- Case to be studied
Mark L. McCaslin et all (2003), The Five-Question Method For Framing A Qualitative Research Study, The Qualitative Report Volume 8 Number 3 September 2003 447-461
There is no inherent contradiction or conflict between qualitative and quantitative research or theory, as has been well documented by several scholars (cf. first two references).
Actually, both terms are misnomers, so it is in fact incoherent to talk of qualitative or quantitative research. It is not the research that is qualitative or quantitative, but so are the data. What you do with them, determines if you are rather qualitatively minded or more quantitatively oriented. See files attached (further references at the end of those papers).
If you look at what researchers who claim to do qualitative versus quantitative research (or the reverse) are actually doing, you quickly find out that there is a certain asymmetry:
- you can very well do research using purely qualitative data and analysis
- you can't analyse quantitative data without making qualitative assumptions
This is a very important insight. It tells us that quantitative data analysis goes a step further than qualitative data analysis. Or at least tries to do so. However, it is not always possible or meaningfull to do so. Often so-called "qualitative approaches" are more than sufficient to answer a research question or clarify a real-world problem.
Qualitative Data Analysis (e.g. ATLAS.ti, cf. website and book) can be a supreme way to answer research questions about ill-understood phenomena in early research domains, for which Quantitative Data Analysis is (still) too far away because of lack of an adequate measurement framework, so all you have are concepts and relationships between concepts (conceptual frameworks).
However, Explorative Data Analysis (EDA) is a quantitative research variant which largely aims at the same sort of questions as the aforementioned Qualitative Data Analysis, and it does that pretty well as long as you can gather enough statistical data (counting and measuring things).
So you see, the distinction can't be really upheld, unless you concoct and exaggerate spurious differences.
Moreover, one of the most sophisticated methodologies of science is based on the very assumption that in any mature field of research you will find both qualitative and quantitative models of your phenomena, and they do relate to each other in a well-defined way (cf. especially the works of philosopher of science Louis Narens about the concept of meaningfullness, paperback version appearing soon).
http://atlasti.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis
http://www.amazon.com/Qualitative-Analysis-ATLAS-ti-Susanne-Friese/dp/144628204X
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415654564
The question is related to the importance of qualitative understanding in research. It is not on the contradiction or conflict between qualitative and quantitative research. In a research the researcher investigate on certain parameters of a problem and from this investigation tries to arrive at certain conclusion. This statement may appear to be too general and there may be deviations, however, we can accept this as an extremely abstract definition of research. Before starting some decision about the methodology is needed. At this stage a qualitative understanding is necessary so that one can decide the regions of the problem that must be highlighted, the parameters that must be measured or computed and qualitative characteristics that must be monitored. For example if we are trying to optimize a system we must check that under no circumstances the system becomes unstable. This information will never be available from the series of outputs from a finite time computation. One should apply his/her intuition to explain the result and there the importance of qualitative understanding comes in.
@ Anup Kumar Bandyopadhyay :: OK, accepted. My answer is implicit in what I tried to explan: without some sort of "qualitative understanding" there is no hope to arrive at some sort of "quantitative understanding". As far as I can infer from what you denote as "qualitative understanding" (in your answer), this sort of understanding is usually called model-building: i.e. constructing a representation of part of reality in order to be able to reason about it. Such representations have - again usually, there may be exceptions though - both qualitative and quantitative components. If you urge me to confess what is more important: qualitative or quantitative understanding, I would say: Of course "qualitative", because without such an understanding in the first place, I would be nowhere e.g. I would not be able to proceed to a deeper quantitative understanding and explanation or prediction.
Example: in psychophysics, researchers found out with respect to human vision that the simple idea, namely that we human beings build up an Euclidean representation of the outer world we observe, is false. It leads to all sorts of wrong predictions. Thus they came up with the idea (hypothesis), that perhaps the inner visual representation of the outer world is non-Euclidean in the first place. That is what I (and you, I guess) would call a qualitative understanding, because up to this point we didn't measure or calculate anything. However, as soon as we have such a hypothetical explanation, we can of course start designing experiments which produce (quantitative) data on the basis of which we are able to confirm or falsify this (qualitative) hypothesis. That is exactly what happened, and BTW: the hypothesis was confirmed.
Does that make sense to you?
Have a nice weekend!
I agree with your views. I would like to add that to confirm or falsify this qualitative hypothesis it is better, if possible, to use analytical methods instead of large amount of computation (simulation study). Because a closed form solution gives much better understanding than a huge output containing numbers accurate up to say 10th place of decimal. Experimental result should also be supported by such theoretical analysis.
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