Qualitative v/s. Quantitative Research- A Summarized Review

BACKGROUND \nQualitative research is a process of naturalistic inquiry that seeks an in-depth \nunderstanding of social phenomena within their natural setting. It focuses on the \n"why" rather than the "what" of social phenomena and relies on the direct \nexperiences of human beings as meaning-making agents in their everyday lives. \nRather than by logical and statistical procedures, qualitative researchers use \nmultiple systems of inquiry for the study of human phenomena including \nbiography, case study, historical analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography, \ngrounded theory, and phenomenology. Quantitative methodology is the dominant \nresearch framework in the social sciences. It refers to a set of strategies, \ntechniques and assumptions used to study psychological, social and economic \nprocesses through the exploration of numeric patterns. Quantitative research \ngathers a range of numeric data. Some of the numeric data is intrinsically \nquantitative (e.g. personal income), while in other cases the numeric structure \nis imposed (e.g. ‘On a scale from 1 to 10, how depressed did you feel last week?’). \nThe collection of quantitative information allows researchers to conduct simple to \nextremely sophisticated statistical analyses that aggregate the data. Quantitative \nresearch includes methodologies such as questionnaires, structured observations \nor experiments and stands in contrast to qualitative research. Qualitative research \ninvolves the collection and analysis of narratives and/or open-ended observations \nthrough methodologies such as interviews, focus groups or ethnographies. The \npurpose of quantitative research is to generate knowledge and create \nunderstanding about the social world. Quantitative research is used by social \nscientists, including communication researchers, to observe phenomena or \noccurrences affecting individuals. Social scientists are concerned with the study of \npeople. Quantitative research is a way to learn about a particular group of people, \nknown as a sample population. Using scientific inquiry, quantitative research relies \non data that are observed or measured to examine questions about the sample \npopulation. \n