Various versions of this questions have been asked before on RG, and the typical consensus is that your choice of methods depends on your research question. In other words, different methods have different strengths, so one is only "better" than another when you are referring to a specific goal that you want to reach.
It isn't better or worse, it is different. Try thinking of them as phases in the life of a research question. You have a new research question. You begin by exploring: in-depth interviews and focus groups are a good way to get started, especially in tuning in to the rhetoric used by the folks you will focus on. Careful notes & maybe NLP on recordings. What underlying dimensions and ossible connections are you hearing. Ethnography is an excellent next step: What is revealed in the lifeways of your "target group" that you did not expect? Next, search for existing quantitative data that touches on and ideally covers your issue. If no such dataset is available, it is is time to do a survey! Then you do quantitative analysis on the survey data. That raises new questions...
They are different. Quants work gives you a more definitive and robust account of what genuine broad patterns and associations between things are. For example, if I train a worker then they will become more productive. But qual work helps understand more about the process by which training occurs and the detail of how and why workers become more productive.
Qualitative research is “better” only in obtaining relevant data as has already been written about. The initial research phase (or pilotage) is a good opportunity to apply qualitative methods. As well as the interpretation of the results of quantitative research (which is impractical without sufficiently large arrays of formalized data). A complex research program must necessarily combine both groups of methods.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Methodology
- Research Methodology
- Research Papers