@Fernando Albuquerque Costa : The situation within educational research is much more complex and diffuse. The same holds for practice, by the way. For one thing, many social science researchers and practitioners, also in education, welcome "qualitative research" (in a myriad of self-concocted definitions of "qualitative"), as they shy away from genuine quantitative research. In the literature, you can find abundant examples of this predilection for qualitative approaches in one or another form. But then (I agree here with Daniel Wright), what is quantitative research? Is using numbers in some way already quantitative? Is using some descriptive statistics already quantitative? Is testing some null hypothesis already quantitative? Frankly, for me, it is not, but there are many researchers who would agree with one of these cases. 

The reason may be that by training many educational researchers (and other social science researchers) believe, that "quantitative" is synonymous with "statistical", the dominant view of Western science.

Personally, I don't believe, that there is, or should be, a clear distinction between the two: quantitative versus qualitative, unless you adopt the world view of those who advocate the so-called representational measurement paradigm. And here we also have the main clash: it is between those who want to explain something (away) using normal natural language - perhaps polished up a little bit to sound scientific, and those who want to create theoretical models of (social, educational) phenomena, e.g. learning, including some way of measuring those phenomena. If that is one's definition of the quantitative-qualitative divide, I would agree on first sight, but there is much more to say (or read) about that in the past 50 years literature. 

Coming back to your question: I don't believe that there is really much more of the first than of the second type of research, because researchers are/think differently, just like other human beings. But if you push me strongly, I would even hold the opposite view: there is too much qualitative research, i.e. research not guided by genuine theoretical modeling, including sound measurement. ( It is easy to explain this by the way we are all brought up in university, but that would lead to another discussion).

Let me give an example from my own field. I am focusing currently on the method of Peer Rating to solve the Team-Mate-Dilemma in educational assessment. If you look at the literature over the past 30 years, you will find that researchers and practitioners have not really solved the problem of fair distribution of scores or marks over the members of a learning group. After the stage was set by a handful of pioneering papers, all that you will find is copying of those initial ideas without any real progress. That also means: basic flaws in the initial models are propagated without reflection or correction. What you see is what I would call qualitative research: taking up some nice ideas, doing some empirical action research, and write a nice paper about it. This can go on forever, without making any progress. A very recent literature review of this field, appearing in the journal Medical Teacher of 2016, confirms what I state here, so - happily or sadly ?  - it is more than a personal opinion.

Can we do better? In principle, yes. But as long as university practices don't change, conformity to established norms of doing research will win over deep research and creativity which takes time to develop. Time is precious, so ...

Quantitative methodology is the only way to answer a question with external validity. Qualitative methods simply raise possibilities or identify new insights. By definition, qualitative methods cannot be generalized beyond the specific context in which the themes and insights are generated.

I think before people can answer your question it will be useful for you to define what you mean by qualitative and quantitative. 

@Fernando Albuquerque Costa : The situation within educational research is much more complex and diffuse. The same holds for practice, by the way. For one thing, many social science researchers and practitioners, also in education, welcome "qualitative research" (in a myriad of self-concocted definitions of "qualitative"), as they shy away from genuine quantitative research. In the literature, you can find abundant examples of this predilection for qualitative approaches in one or another form. But then (I agree here with Daniel Wright), what is quantitative research? Is using numbers in some way already quantitative? Is using some descriptive statistics already quantitative? Is testing some null hypothesis already quantitative? Frankly, for me, it is not, but there are many researchers who would agree with one of these cases. 

The reason may be that by training many educational researchers (and other social science researchers) believe, that "quantitative" is synonymous with "statistical", the dominant view of Western science.

Personally, I don't believe, that there is, or should be, a clear distinction between the two: quantitative versus qualitative, unless you adopt the world view of those who advocate the so-called representational measurement paradigm. And here we also have the main clash: it is between those who want to explain something (away) using normal natural language - perhaps polished up a little bit to sound scientific, and those who want to create theoretical models of (social, educational) phenomena, e.g. learning, including some way of measuring those phenomena. If that is one's definition of the quantitative-qualitative divide, I would agree on first sight, but there is much more to say (or read) about that in the past 50 years literature. 

Coming back to your question: I don't believe that there is really much more of the first than of the second type of research, because researchers are/think differently, just like other human beings. But if you push me strongly, I would even hold the opposite view: there is too much qualitative research, i.e. research not guided by genuine theoretical modeling, including sound measurement. ( It is easy to explain this by the way we are all brought up in university, but that would lead to another discussion).

Let me give an example from my own field. I am focusing currently on the method of Peer Rating to solve the Team-Mate-Dilemma in educational assessment. If you look at the literature over the past 30 years, you will find that researchers and practitioners have not really solved the problem of fair distribution of scores or marks over the members of a learning group. After the stage was set by a handful of pioneering papers, all that you will find is copying of those initial ideas without any real progress. That also means: basic flaws in the initial models are propagated without reflection or correction. What you see is what I would call qualitative research: taking up some nice ideas, doing some empirical action research, and write a nice paper about it. This can go on forever, without making any progress. A very recent literature review of this field, appearing in the journal Medical Teacher of 2016, confirms what I state here, so - happily or sadly ?  - it is more than a personal opinion.

Can we do better? In principle, yes. But as long as university practices don't change, conformity to established norms of doing research will win over deep research and creativity which takes time to develop. Time is precious, so ...

Peter - you seem to answer this question from the point of view of the unhelpful paradigm tension that qualitative research is inferior to quantitative research research because it is not generalisable and/or has different validity processes. That is somewhat naive worldview in the context of research today. I'm a big fan of mixed methods research (please see the attached chapter for further clarification) which is often pragmatic and embraces both paradigms equally in an attempt to move beyond the dated impasse of the out-of-date tension. Daniel - I'm not sure that Fernando needs to clarify what is meant by qualitative and quantitative approaches or methodology. They are already extremely well known. 

Back to your original question Fernando. It depends on the 'educational' discipline. For instance, to me, this would be nursing education. A decade ago - the vast majority of nursing-related education would be qualitative. Nowadays it varies - depending on the journal and context. It's perhaps about 50:50 - which shows the recent shift from qualitative dominance to a sharing of paradigms now - something that Peter might consider. 

Interesting comments.

I think the issue is not either Quantitative or qualitative methods in education research rather the mixed method can help improving our understanding on research question/s that we work on. Using first Quantitative method to know general relationships among the variables of the research question and then conducting few case analysis can further dig into the depth of the 'research issue' in order to confirm or not the findings from quantitative analysis.

I am deeply puzzled about this apparent solution of the Q-Q-divide (see my earlier remarks for this notion) by introducing mixed methods:

• What should be mixed in which order and proportion?
• Why and how could the mixed ingredients be kept separately before mixing, and still be called research?
• Is either of the ingredients (quantitative or qualitative) on its own capable of advancing science in a systematic and notable way?

I have my doubts, but I also believe, that we are actually caught up by a pseudo-problem caused by confusing or misused terminology:

• It is confusing to call and treat a genuine part of a research study, e.g. a literature review, itself research (but there has been a discussion about that issue here on RG!). You wouldn't call a chapter in a book a book, would you?
• We are also caught up by the existence of publishers and journals which give writers about this or that topic an outlet for their creative writing. That's well and fair, but again hasn't necessarily to do with scientific research as most of us understand it.

BTW: I don't hold a view of science as being a solid brick of uniform matter. Sciences differ not only as to content or focus but also as per methodology. Most people would also like to make a distinction between "pure" science and "applied" science. With the latter, we may also associate projects and publications whose only intention it is to summarize, popularize or transfer existing knowledge (this includes education) or to use such knowledge to create and produce artefacts (this includes technology). In the realm of pure science, we start with existing knowledge and try to confirm or refute it (because all knowledge is fallible) or to create better and more general explanations (so-called theories). But in all those instances, content/focus cannot effectively be separated from methodology, nor is it the case that one comes before the other. All attempts of philosophers of science to do just that have failed, at least up to now.

In conclusion: don't separate what is inseparably interwoven; think of science (scientific research) as problem-solving: you are only ready when you propose a solution, which others can take up, critically review, expand upon, etc. Just talking about a problem without offering a (partial) solution is not very much helpful in science (but may be in other contexts). Rephrasing or repeating what others have already worked out and/or written down is still less fruitful (exceptions admitted, e.g. encyclopedia etc.) and may even lead to misconceptions if not done correctly and carefully (and sometimes such misconceptions are difficult to get rid off, if enough people have adopted them as genuine wisdom; typical example of our time: Wikipedia & Co).

It depends on your research goal. Each one helps us to explain different parts of the object in the educational field.

I think there are three main reasons:

1. The explanatory capacity of qualitative research is always less powerful than that of well-conducted quantitative research. If qualitative research is well performed, they provide a good understanding, but not an explanation of the mechanisms involved.

https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/papers/02102862n77/02102862n77p181.pdf

2. Frequently the research questions are not correctly defined, the variables involved (categories, nodes) are not defined. It is investigated with a certain level of speculation.

We do not work with programs that allow ordering research, such as NVIVO. Or, when working with software, the uncertainty of the questions and the categories, limits the analysis.

http://www.qsrinternational.com/what-is-nvivo

http://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo-community

3. These are local investigations, with limited theoretical capacity or with limited external validity. Therefore, they can not be exploited. They only serve as more or less interesting examples.

When they overcome these three limitations, qualitative research has a great heuristic force, providing deep insights.

Part of a full-blown research project is data analysis, which can take different forms depending among other things on whether the data are qualitative (including, for instance, linguistic data and verbal protocols) or quantitative (for instance, exploratory data analysis (EDA). Over the last years, interesting software packages have come on the market to take the routine part of these analyses away from the researcher. Still, the researcher has to decide what makes sense and what not.

Once the analysis /analyses have been done, the rest of the research project has to follow. Research doesn't end with data analysis, on the contrary. Research isn't statistics, on the contrary. But both descriptive/inferential statistics and quantitative/qualitative data analysis can be of great help to the researcher as initial part of his full project, aimed at building models and solving real problems (cf. link below, just one of many relevant constructive counter-movements to the mainstream philosophy of science).

https://www.cc.gatech.edu/aimosaic/faculty/nersessian/

I certainly disagree with Paul Hubert Vossen's characterization of mixed methods., since there are quite a number of textbooks that address his issues. In particular, issues about as "order and proportion" have been received systematic attention since the late 80s. Nor is there any requirement to keep the ingredients separate -- that is just one option.

I also think there may be strong cross-national differences in the preference for qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. Here in the U.S., the field of education is one of the leading areas for the use of mixed methods research.

As for whehter or not qualitative and quantitative research are really different, here is a link to a recent discussion of that issue:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Whats_the_point_of_splitting_the_social_research_methodology_in_quantitative_and_qualitative

Hi, everybody! Thanks a lot.

We have already very important and very informative contributions, indeed.

Nevertheless, to some of you I remark that my starting point was not to insist in the discussion about which is the best paradigm, if any.

My question is about why quantitative research in Education seems to continue to be the mainstream strategy for the most part of researchers.

In other words, why does qualitative studies still have so little expression in the scientific literature in the field of Education?

We will continue to share our understanding of this issue.

thanks

@Fernando Albuquerque Costa: OK, perhaps I (we?) missed your point. Let me try a plausible answer to your question. Could it be that this focus on quantitative research in education (whatever its intrinsic merits) has nothing to do with education per se, as we as teachers and students understand and practice it?

Maybe it is completely or largely motivated by extrinsic factors:

• The fact that we have to quantify students' learning progress in some way in order to deliver grades to faculty.
• The fact that faculty has to make decisions regarding hiring, firing or promotion (e.g. tenure) based (for a large part) on quantitative data, e.g. number of successful students in classes, etc.
• The fact that economic and political interests force faculty to deliver some sort of evaluation of what's going on in public universities in order to decide on public funding.
• Etc.

In such cases, people may believe or have learned (the bad way?), that qualitative argument should be underpinned by quantitative data, or what it usually amounts to: descriptive statistics.

Once this motor is running, it turns on the next machine or level of quantitative analysis. The result is well-known:

• international organisations which make money with conducting ... quantitative research in Education, e.g. PISA.
• Or smaller companies selling all kinds of apps to calculate any sort of educational metrics, e.g. doing Rasch analysis.

Could it be so simple? Frankly, I don't think so, although it may be a clearly visible part of the puzzle. I believe, we have to zoom in on less visible aspects of human culture, things like trust/mistrust in qualitative arguments, the difficulty of logic reasoning versus familiarity of numeric operations, our fascination with computers which are extremely good in quantitative analysis and just beginning to be supportive of qualitative analysis, etc.All such things occur largely un/subconscious, hidden away in how we raise our children and educate them in the schools. Indeed, changing this isn't simple at all, as we take so much for granted and get/give no incentives to break away from what seems to be so "natural". We are immersed into an environment, a habitat, which is flooded with sophisticated powerful number-crunching machines but trivialized even archaic cognition-enhancing gadgets. So if you have to choose what to do take to appear doing

All such things occur largely un/subconscious, hidden away in how we raise our children and educate them in the schools. Indeed, changing this isn't simple at all, as we take so much for granted and get/give no incentives to break away from what seems to be so "natural". We are immersed into an environment, a habitat, which is flooded with sophisticated powerful number-crunching machines but trivialized even archaic cognition-enhancing gadgets. So if you have to choose what to take to appear doing serious research you'll go for the first, not the latter. That choice, however, is largely subconscious, not really reflected. That makes it so "obvious".

My (Fernando Albuquerque Costa) question is about why quantitative research in Education seems to continue to be the mainstream strategy for the most part of researchers.  In other words, why does qualitative studies still have so little expression in the scientific literature in the field of Education?

From my personal observation to date, quantitative research is still an approach adopted by many educational researchers.  However, more and more qualitative research as well as mixed method research are gaining popularity among many educational researchers.

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I think Qualitative research is better choice then the Quantitative research in Education.

I think both are important in different angles.

Deficiency of vitamin D has bad effected on strength of bones and teeth i. e. weakness of bone and teeth, therefore expose to sunlight for converted Pro vitamin D into active form of vitamin D,

Thank you so much @Paul Hubert Vossen.

Yes, now we can say that we start to have some explanations for the starting issue and question. I agree with your interpretation namely when you do refer the willing of control about what is done by some international institutions. Even if we think in the researchers production. Individually or institutionally, with the implementation of rankings. How can we deeply understand each phenomenon of the educational reality if we are strongly pushed to publish. In fact, to go to the ground and to collect and analyze qualitative data don't fit with any kind of rush...

Don't agree?

Best regards.

The reason might be that most of the research on education has been done in the US or elsewhere using the American research tradition. The QUANT and QUAL research is more like two cultural paradigms where the first one represents the US culture and the second one represents the UK culture.

I recently participated in a workshop where most of people were from the education department or related to research on education, and came from different universities. This question was raised there too. While QUANT vs QUAL have their own cultural paradigms and school of thoughts, one thing that turned out strongly in the discussion was the availability of skill set at a given department. 

One participant stated that she is asked to do QUANT research as there is no one at the department who could supervise QUAL work.

Another said, since I have many researchers to manage and managing QUAL research is more demanding than QUANT, I ask my students to do QUANT based research.

Another opinion was that, since policy makers understand numbers better, it is easier to create impact policy making using QUANT than QUAL. 

So, I think that QUANT research is considered to be "easy to do", "easy to manage", and can produce more impact as compared to QUAL. Perhaps this is why it is more prominent as compared to QUAL in education research.

Another explanation could be that  we are more focused interested in "HOW" rather than "WHY", so QUANT becomes ultimate choice.

Thanks @Ali Farooq for your contributions.

I guess that we are more and more closer with these kind of explanations indeed.

Best regards

I think that the mixed method is the most fruitful for understanding reality. We need figures to describe the reality and we need to catch people's experience and reflections to undersant depper the reality. When we search for the research done in education it seems to me that we have more and more mixed research. Nevertheless maybe qualitive research will win. That is due to the fact that a lot of educational reserach is focused in a specific school or class or group, and we know case studies are mainly qualitative. But we can also find quantitative research when we consider the studies on a country or a region or in comparative studies. Of course qualitative and quantitative research are not the same thing but they are both important for education. I think that this discussion on qualitative or quantitative is important just to remember it.

The choice of research type to adopt should primarily be based on the purpose of the research, most often the researcher's skill dictates which type to use. Quantitative research is common where researchers erroneously believe that qualitative research lacks rigour, therefore its findings cannot be trusted. With that assumption quantitative research is conducted even where such researcher's skill in the quantitative method is inadequate. This explains the prominence of quantitative research over qualitative research. Unfortunately, qualitative research is hardly given attention in the college curriculum. However, mixed- methods design is fast gaining popularity in education and in other fields. It yields more robust findings.

"mixed methods" sounds to me like "when you can't convince peers of your qualitative methods and findings but quantitative methods are (far) beyond your capabilities, then use a portion of some qualitative approach and mix it up with another portion of a simple enough quantitative approach, and see if they will swallow it." Sounds rather cynical and opportunistic. I would welcome *any* reference to well-done mixed-methods research in the social sciences, going beyond some simplistic "mixing up".

A significant problem with much qualitative research, especially in education, is that it commonly involves a very small N and therefore lacks generalizability. I've seen a shift toward more quantitative studies over the last decade or so, which I believe is a good thing. My sense is that graduates schools of education are doing a better job of training students in statistics and quantitative methodologies. Would be good to hear from faulty in graduate schools of education on this point.

An important point is when you do the one or the other. Generally speaking, the quantitative stage of a research comes after a qualitative set of hypotheses has been proposed. The problem here is that many researchers lack some basic understanding of how Statistics works, so they apply a technique and get some results (to p or not to p, basically) without questioning the suitabilty of that technique to the problem, or the analizability of their corpuses.

A second problem is that we, as linguists, are gradually being pushed towards the quantitative side by a movement which I will call "the Psicologization of Linguistics": as linguists are forced to validate their careers through publications in high-rated journals, they find that the highest rated journals in Linguistics come from outside the field (like Brain and Language). Many of these journals only accept a paper if there is an experiment in it, dealt with the methods coming from Psychology (a discipline which has already suffered the quantitative turn). This means experimental design, control groups and statistic treatment of data. Therefore, the only way to get a paper published is to embrace quantitative methods. But recall that, as linguists like Esa Itkonen have repeatedly warned, Linguistics is not a science about describing objects in the physical world, but a science about norms. A quantitative-only approach will misleadingly take that validation in a corpus is the only way to make the field advance.

Fernando Albuquerque Costa

Actually it depends on the research questions and how it will be answered. You must consider your world view in the research "epistemology, ontology, axiology ".