Qualitative vs Quantitative Research – What Is the

difference?
Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative
research deals with words and meanings. Quantitative methods allow you to test a
hypothesis by systematically collecting and analyzing data, while qualitative
methods allow you to explore ideas and experiences in depth.Apr 12, 2019

Bryn Farnsworth, Ph.D

Once you get started with human behavior research you soon find yourself running
into the question of whether your research project is qualitative or quantitative
in nature. There are inherent differences between qualitative and quantitative
research methods, although their objectives and applications overlap in many
ways.

The core difference

In a nutshell, qualitative research generates “textual data” (non-numerical).
Quantitative research, on the contrary, produces “numerical data” or information
that can be converted into numbers.

Content:

 What is Qualitative Research

 What is Quantitative Research
 Qualitative or quantitative study design?

What is qualitative research and why is it important

Qualitative research is considered to be particularly suitable for exploratory
research (e.g. during the pilot stage of a research project, for example). It is
primarily used to discover and gain an in-depth understanding of individual
experiences, thoughts, opinions, and trends, and to dig deeper into the problem
at hand.

The data collection toolkit of a qualitative researcher is quite versatile, ranging

from completely unstructured to semi-structured techniques.

Most common applied Qualitative Methods:

 Individual interviews
 Group discussions
 Focus groups
 Behavioral observations
Check out our Blog: How to measure Human Behavior: Survey vs. Focus Groups

vs. Biometric

In addition, eye tracking or automatic facial expressions can be collected and

analyzed qualitatively, for example in usability research, where gaze patterns
(such as with heatmaps) or moments of expressions of frustration / confusion can
be used to track the journey of an individual respondent within a software interface.

What is Eye Tracking and How Does it Work?

Typically, qualitative research focuses on individual cases and their subjective

impressions. This requires an iterative study design – data collection and research
questions are adjusted according to what is learned.

Often, qualitative projects are done with few respondents and are supposed to
provide insights into the setting of a problem, serving as a source of inspiration to
generate hypotheses for subsequent quantitative projects.

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What is quantitative research and how to measure it

Simply put, quantitative research is all about numbers and figures. It is used to
quantify opinions, attitudes, behaviors, and other defined variables with the goal
to support or refute hypotheses about a specific phenomenon, and potentially
contextualize the results from the study sample in a wider population (or specific
groups).

As quantitative research explicitly specifies what is measured and how it is

measured in order to uncover patterns in – for example – behavior, motivation,
emotion, and cognition, quantitative data collection is considered to be much
more structured than qualitative methods.

Check out: How To Do Behavioral Coding in iMotions

Quantitative research techniques

Quantitative techniques typically comprise various forms of questionnaires

and surveys, structured interviews as well as a behavioral observation based on
explicit coding and categorization schemes.

In addition to these traditional techniques, biosensor recordings such as eye

tracking, EEG, EDA / GSR, EMG, and ECG as well as computer-guided
automatic facial expression analysis procedures are used.
Check out: What Is Facial Expression Analysis? (And How Does It Work?)

All of these quantify the behavioral processes in such a way that numerical results
can be obtained – for example, fixation duration from eye tracking (representing
the amount of visual attention), the number of GSR peaks (indicating the amount
of physiological arousal) or the power of a specific EEG band.

Check out infographics: The Study of Human Behavior: Measuring, analyzing and
understanding

After data collection, quantitative analysis techniques and statistics can be

applied, such as t-tests and ANOVAs, to non-parametric methods. This often
necessitates much bigger sample sizes compared to qualitative research but
allows you to make more solid conclusions, that are backed up with data.

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Qualitative or quantitative research study design?

Ultimately, whether to pursue a qualitative or a quantitative study approach is up
to you – however, be sure to base your decision on the nature of your project and
the kind of information you seek in the context of your study and the resources
available to you. Qualitative will offer you an in-depth understanding of your
research problem and hopefully help answer your hypothesis. Quantitative will
allow you to scale your research to provide larger sets of data for reliability and
validity. A combination of the two provides you with objectivity.

Measurements to avoid bias

This is generally described with respect to the following criteria:

Objectivity

Objectivity is the most general requirement and reflects the fact that measures
should come to the same result no matter who is using them. Also, they should
generate the same outcomes independent of the outside influences. For example,
a multiple-choice personality questionnaire or survey is objective if it returns the
same score irrelevant of whether the participant responds verbally or in written
form. Further, the result should be independent of the knowledge or attitude of the
experimenter, so that the results are purely driven by the performance of the
respondent.

Reliability
A measure is said to have a high reliability if it returns the same value under
consistent conditions. There are several sub-categories of reliability. For example,
“retest reliability” describes the stability of a measure over time, “inter-rater
reliability” reflects the amount to which different experimenters give consistent
estimates of the same behavior, while “split-half reliability” breaks a test into two
and examines to what extent the two halves generate identical results.

Validity

This is the final and most crucial criterion. It reflects the extent to which a measure
collects what it is supposed to collect. Imagine an experiment where body size is
collected to measure its relationship with happiness. Obviously, the measure is
both objective and reliable (body size measures are quite consistent irrespective
of the person taking the measurement) but it is truly a poor measure with respect
to its construct validity (i.e., its capability to truly capture the underlying variable)
for happiness.