List several ways in which qualitative research differs from quantitative research in the social sciences.
Describe the strengths and weaknesses of qualitative research compared with quantitative research.
Give examples of qualitative research.
What Is Qualitative Research?
This textbook is primarily about quantitative research,in part because most studies conducted in psychology are quantitative in nature. Quantitative researchers typically start with a focused research question or hypothesis, collect a small amount of numerical data from a large number of individuals (large-N design), describe the resulting data using statistical techniques, and draw general conclusions about some large population. Although this method is the most common approach to conducting empirical research in psychology, qualitative research is an important alternative in psychology and other social sciences. Qualitative research originated in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology but is used to study psychological topics as well. Qualitative researchers generally begin with a research question, collect large amounts of relatively “unfiltered” data from a relatively small number of individuals, and describe their data using nonstatistical techniques. An introduction to analyzing qualitative data was considered in the chapter on analyzing. Qualitative researchers are sometimes less concerned with drawing general conclusions, especially about cause-and-effect relationships, about human behavior, and may be more interested in understanding in detail the experience of their research participants.
Consider, for example, a study by researcher Per Lindqvist et al. (2008), who wanted to learn how the families of teenage suicide victims cope with their loss.Lindqvist et al. (2008) did not have a specific research question such as "What percentage of family members join suicide support groups?", and there was no hypothesis. Instead, Lindqvist et al. (2008) wanted to understand the variety of reactions that families had, with a focus on what it is like from their perspectives. To address this question, Lindqvist et al. (2008) interviewed the families of 10 teenage suicide victims in their homes in rural Sweden. The interviews were relatively unstructured, beginning with a general request for the families to talk about the victim and ending with an invitation to talk about anything else that they wanted to tell the interviewer. One of the most important themes that emerged from these interviews was that even as life returned to “normal,” the families continued to struggle with the question of why their loved one committed suicide. This struggle appeared to be especially difficult for families in which the suicide was most unexpected. Review Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Characteristics of Qualitative Research box, then consider how each of these differs (or not) from quantitative research.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Characteristics of Qualitative Research. (CC-BY-NC; Bunmi Malau-Aduli and Faith Alele via Introduction to Research Methods for Undergraduate Health Profession Students (4.2: Definitions and Characteristics of Qualitative Research))
For ease of reading, the content in Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) is repeated here:
Holistic account: Qualitative research seeks to develop a complex picture of the problem or issues under study by identifying the many factors.
Reflexivity: Researchers reflect on their role in the study and how their culture, personal background and experiences may affect data interpretation.
Emergent design: The research process is emergent; some phases of the process may shift or change once data collection begins.
Participants meaning: Participants meaning of the problem or issue is the focus of the research your desired text here.
Inductive and deductive data analysis: Patterns,categories, themes are built inductively. Evidence from the data to support each of them are obtained deductively.
Multiple sources of data: Multiple forms of data such as interviews, observations, documents and audio-visual information are gathered.
Researchers as key instrument: Researchers collect data themselves by examining documents, observing behavior or interviewing participants.
Natural setting: Qualitative researchers typically gather data at the location where participants encounter the phenomenon under investigation.
The Purpose of Qualitative Research
Again, this textbook is primarily about quantitative research in psychology. The strength of quantitative research is its ability to provide precise answers to specific research questions, especially related to the causes of behavior. This method is how we know that people have a strong tendency to obey authority figures, for example, and that students who are women are not substantially more talkative than students who are men. But while quantitative research is good at providing precise answers to specific research questions, it is not nearly as good at generating novel and interesting research questions. Likewise, while quantitative research is good at drawing general conclusions about human behavior, it is not nearly as good at providing detailed descriptions of the behavior of particular groups in particular situations. And quantitative research is not very good at communicating what it is actually like to be a member of a particular group in a particular situation.
But the relative weaknesses of quantitative research are the relative strengths of qualitative research. Qualitative research can help researchers to generate new and interesting research questions and hypotheses. The findings of Lindqvist et al. (2008), for example, suggests that there may be a general relationship between how unexpected a suicide is and how consumed the family is with trying to understand why the teen committed suicide. This relationship can now be explored using quantitative research. But it is unclear whether this question would have arisen at all without the researchers sitting down with the families and listening to what they themselves wanted to say about their experience. Qualitative research can also provide rich and detailed descriptions of human behavior in the real-world contexts in which it occurs. Among qualitative researchers, this depth is often referred to as “thick description” (Geertz, 1973). Similarly, qualitative research can convey a sense of what it is actually like to be a member of a particular group or in a particular situation—what qualitative researchers often refer to as the “lived experience” of the research participants. Lindqvist et al. (2008), for example, describe how all the families spontaneously offered to show the interviewer the victim’s bedroom or the place where the suicide occurred—revealing the importance of these physical locations to the families. It seems unlikely that a quantitative study would have discovered this detail.
Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): Some contrasts between qualitative and quantitative research
Qualitative
Quantitative
In-depth information about relatively few people
Less depth information with larger samples
Conclusions are based on interpretations drawn by the investigator
Conclusions are based on statistical analyses
Global and exploratory
Specific and focused
Data Collection and Analysis in Qualitative Research
Data collection approaches in qualitative research are quite varied. In the chapter on measurement, we discussed many common methods to collect qualitative data, including:
Interviews
Focus Groups
Observations
Physical Trace
Archival Data
While these methods of measurement might not look like they have much in common, they all may result in data that is not quantitative. Interviews and focus groups result in a large amount of narrative data, observations can result in video recordings of a variety of actions, physical trace is also visual, and archival data can be just about anything that is stored! What you might notice is that all of these methods of measurement could also be coded into quantitative data. It is up to the researcher to decide the best way to organize and (re-)code their data. To illustrate this idea, imagine a team of researchers that conducts a series of unstructured interviews with people recovering from alcohol use disorder to learn about the role of their religious faith in their recovery. This results in hours of interview recordings (or pages of printed transcripts) which can be analyzed from a qualitative foundation by looking for patterns and themes, or from a quantitative foundation such that the researcher codes the data in terms of how often each participant mentions God (or a “higher power”), and then uses statistics to find out whether those who mention God more often are more successful in abstaining from alcohol then those who mention God less often. In other words, the quantitative-qualitative distinction depends more on what researchers do with the data they have collected than with why or how they collected the data.
Data Analysis in Qualitative Research
Quantitative and qualitative research generally differ along several important dimensions, such as the testing of the research hypotheses, the method of data collection, as well as the method of data analysis. The chapter on analyzing has a sub-section on qualitative data to included a basic introduction to qualitative research, organizing qualitative data, options for coding qualitative data, and moving from data points to findings.
As an example, consider a study by researchers Laura Abrams and Laura Curran, who used the grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to study the experience of postpartum depression symptoms among low-income mothers (Abrams & Curran, 2009). In qualitative research using grounded theory, researchers start with the data and develop a theory or an interpretation that is “grounded in” those data. Researchers do this analysis in stages. First, they identify ideas that are repeated throughout the data. Then they organize these ideas into a smaller number of broader themes. Finally, they write an interpretation of the data in terms of the themes that they have identified. This theoretical narrative focuses on the subjective experience of the participants and is usually supported by many direct quotations from the participants themselves.Abrams and Curran's (2009) data were the result of unstructured interviews with 19 participants. Table \(\PageIndex{2}\) shows the five broad themes identified by Abrams and Curran's (2009), and the more specific repeating ideas that made up each of those themes. In the research report, Abrams and Curran (2009) provided numerous quotations from their participants as evidence of the themes, such as this one:
Well, just recently my apartment was broken into and the fact that his Medicaid for some reason was cancelled so a lot of things was happening within the last two weeks all at one time. So that in itself I don’t want to say almost drove me mad but it put me in a funk.…Like I really was depressed. (Abrams & Curran, 2009, 357)
Their reporting of the results focused on the participants’ experience of their symptoms, not as an abstract “affective disorder” but as closely tied to the daily struggle of raising children alone under often difficult circumstances.
Table \(\PageIndex{2}\): Themes and Repeating Ideas in a Study of Postpartum Depression Among Low-Income Mothers. Based on Research by Abrams and Curran (2009).
Theme
Repeating ideas
Ambivalence
“I wasn’t prepared for this baby,” “I didn’t want to have any more children.”
Caregiving overload
“Please stop crying,” “I need a break,” “I can’t do this anymore.”
Juggling
“No time to breathe,” “Everyone depends on me,” “Navigating the maze.”
Mothering alone
“I really don’t have any help,” “My baby has no father.”
Real-life worry
“I don’t have any money,” “Will my baby be OK?” “It’s not safe here.”
The Quantitative-Qualitative “Debate”
Given their differences, it may come as no surprise that quantitative and qualitative research in the social sciences do not coexist in complete harmony. Some quantitative researchers criticize qualitative methods on the grounds that they lack objectivity, are difficult to evaluate in terms of reliability and validity, and do not allow generalization to people or situations other than those actually studied. However, qualitative research and analysis may have seom advantages over quantitative research because it explicitly acknowledges the dangers of not being objective, consistent, accurately measured, or generalizable. In fact, they have developed a number of frameworks for addressing these issues. A full discussion of these frameworks are beyond the scope of our discussion, but the table below shows show questions to ask yourself (as the researcher) to understand your role in the research process and to respect your participants.
How does your positionality impact what research you choose to do?
Motivation or interest
Access to topic
Emotional proximity to topic
Epistemology
How does your positionality impact how you know what you know?
Critical lens vs. objectivity
Ontology
How does your positionality impact what you observe as a researcher?
Insider/outsider status
Beliefs about reality
Methodology
How does your positionality impact how you make methodological choices?
Historical traditions
Educational background
Researcher-as-instrument
How does your positionality impact how you relate to participants?
Power and privilege
Access to participants
Communication
How does your positionality impact how you represent yourself in writing and other communication?
Perceptions of name
Disclosures of identity
Language choices
At the same time, some qualitative researchers criticize quantitative methods on the grounds that they overlook the richness of human behavior and experience and instead answer simple questions about easily quantifiable variables. And in general, quantitative researchers are well aware of the issue of oversimplification. They do not believe that all human behavior and experience can be adequately described in terms of a small number of variables and the statistical relationships among them. Instead, they use simplification as a strategy for uncovering general principles of human behavior.
Many researchers from both the quantitative and qualitative camps now agree that the two approaches are complementary, and can be combined into what has come to be called mixed-methods research (Todd et al., 2004).In fact, the studies discussed previous by Lindqvist and colleagues and by Abrams and Curran both combined quantitative and qualitative approaches (Abrams & Curran, 2009; Lindvist et al., 2008). One approach to combining quantitative and qualitative research is to use qualitative research for hypothesis generation and quantitative research for hypothesis testing. Again, while a qualitative study might suggest that families who experience an unexpected suicide have more difficulty resolving the question of why, a well-designed quantitative study could test a hypothesis by measuring these specific variables in a large sample. A second approach to combining quantitative and qualitative research is referred to as triangulation. The idea is to use both quantitative and qualitative methods simultaneously to study the same general questions and to compare the results. If the results of the quantitative and qualitative methods converge on the same general conclusion, they reinforce and enrich each other. If the results diverge, then they suggest an interesting new question: Why do the results diverge and how can they be reconciled?
Using qualitative research can often help clarify quantitative results via triangulation. Trenor et al. (2008)investigated the experience of engineering students who were women. In the first phase, these engineering students were asked to complete a survey in which they rated a number of their perceptions, including their sense of belonging. Their results were statistically compared across the student ethnicities, and statistically, the various ethnic groups showed no differences in their ratings of their sense of belonging. One might look at that result and conclude that ethnicity does not have anything to do with one’s sense of belonging. However, in the second phase, Trenor et al. (2008) conducted interviews with the students, and in those interviews, many students from ethnic backgrounds that have been minoritized reported how the diversity of cultures at the university enhanced their sense of belonging. Without the qualitative component, we might have drawn the wrong conclusion about the quantitative results. This example shows how qualitative and quantitative research work together to help us understand human behavior.
References
Abrams, L. S., & Curran, L. (2009). “And you’re telling me not to stress?” A grounded theory study of postpartum depression symptoms among low-income mothers. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33, 351–362.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Lindqvist, P., Johansson, L., & Karlsson, U. (2008). In the aftermath of teenage suicide: A qualitative study of the psychosocial consequences for the surviving family members. BMC Psychiatry, 8, 26. Retrieved from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/8/26
Secules, S., McCall, C., Mejia, J. A., Beebe, C., Masters, A. S., Sánchez-Peña, M., & Svyantek, M. (2021). Positionality practices and dimensions impact on equity research: A collaborative inquiry and call to the community. Journal of Engineering Education, 110, 19-43. DOI:10.1002/jee.20377
Todd, Z., Nerlich, B., McKeown, S., & Clarke, D. D. (2004) Mixing methods in psychology: The integration of qualitative and quantitative methods in theory and practice. London, UK: Psychology Press.
Trenor, J.M., Yu, S.L., Waight, C.L., Zerda. K.S & Sha T.-L. (2008). The relations of ethnicity to female engineering students’ educational experiences and college and career plans in an ethnically diverse learning environment. Journal of Engineering Education, 97(4), 449-465.
