Considering Quantitative and Qualitative Issues Together

New Directions for Program Evaluation, 1994

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum Qualitative Social Research, 2001

Journal of Evidence Based Medicine and Healthcare, 2019

BACKGROUND Qualitative research is a process of naturalistic inquiry that seeks an in-depth understanding of social phenomena within their natural setting. It focuses on the "why" rather than the "what" of social phenomena and relies on the direct experiences of human beings as meaning-making agents in their everyday lives. Rather than by logical and statistical procedures, qualitative researchers use multiple systems of inquiry for the study of human phenomena including biography, case study, historical analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology. Quantitative methodology is the dominant research framework in the social sciences. It refers to a set of strategies, techniques and assumptions used to study psychological, social and economic processes through the exploration of numeric patterns. Quantitative research gathers a range of numeric data. Some of the numeric data is intrinsically quantitative (e.g. personal income), while in other cases the numeric structure is imposed (e.g. 'On a scale from 1 to 10, how depressed did you feel last week?'). The collection of quantitative information allows researchers to conduct simple to extremely sophisticated statistical analyses that aggregate the data. Quantitative research includes methodologies such as questionnaires, structured observations or experiments and stands in contrast to qualitative research. Qualitative research involves the collection and analysis of narratives and/or open-ended observations through methodologies such as interviews, focus groups or ethnographies. The purpose of quantitative research is to generate knowledge and create understanding about the social world. Quantitative research is used by social scientists, including communication researchers, to observe phenomena or occurrences affecting individuals. Social scientists are concerned with the study of people. Quantitative research is a way to learn about a particular group of people, known as a sample population. Using scientific inquiry, quantitative research relies on data that are observed or measured to examine questions about the sample population. 1-2

The importance and meanings of the contemporary debate on quantitative and qualitative methods in social sciences and management research comes out from the fact that the participants defend their ideas in the name of science. Discussions take place at different levels, from basic epistemological topics to current decisions and evaluations of scientific communities. They involve subjects about what is science and what is a scientific theory and about what are the functions of quantitative and qualitative methods and what aspects of social world can be captured by each of them. The paper will focuss on the philosophical conceptual background of the debate and it will point out that the main concepts are considered in different ways: there are different notions of science and scientific theories; quantitative methods are defined some times as non-numerical methods and some times as interpretative methods of the meanings and purposes of social actors; finally quantitative methods include measurements, mathematical models and statistical inferences, which have different basics and rules. The first part of the paper will present a short historical overview on science and method. It will comment the geometry of Euclides and the Aristotelian physics, the legitimation of quantitative methods in the scientific revolution by Galileo and the mathematical physics of Newton; the qualitative approaches of Linnaeus and Darwin; the introduction of new scales of measurement and the creation of statistics; and the positivism of August Comte. The second part of the paper will introduce the contemporary debate on positivist and interpretativist methods. It will comment the evolution of positivism, and interpretativist approaches to the science of history; the phenomenological and hermeneutical justifications of interpretative methods in sociology; the criticism of measurement theory, the structuralist methods of the French school and the legitimation of narratives in social sciences research. That background will facilitate the development of further research about the debate. Key words: Positivist, classificatory and interpretative methods; and epistemology of science.

M.Lib.I.Sc. Project, Panjab University, under guidance of Dr. Shiv Kumar, 2019

There's no hard and fast rule for qualitative versus quantitative research, and it's often taken for granted. It is claimed here that the divide between qualitative and quantitative research is ambiguous, incoherent, and hence of little value, and that its widespread use could have negative implications. This conclusion is supported by a variety of arguments. Qualitative researchers, for example, have varying perspectives on fundamental problems (such as the use of quantification and causal analysis), which makes the difference as such shaky. In addition, many elements of qualitative and quantitative research overlap significantly, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. Practically in the case of field research, the Qualitative and quantitative approach can't be distinguished clearly as the study pointed. The distinction may limit innovation in the development of new research methodologies, as well as cause complication and wasteful activity. As a general rule, it may be desirable not to conceptualise research approaches at such abstract levels as are done in the context of qualitative or quantitative methodologies. Discussions of the benefits and drawbacks of various research methods, rather than general research questions, are recommended.

International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2010

Journal of philosophy of education, 2006

Theory & Psychology, 2011

We introduce this special issue by arguing that quantitative and qualitative research methods do not line up neatly with the guiding philosophical commitments of the two sides of the schism in the field between the mainstream, natural science approach, and the minority, human science position. This leads to the motivating idea for the issue, the view that quantitative methods, when used appropriately, can contribute to interpretive inquiry in psychology. We discuss the issue's two main objectives-(1) presenting lines of actual research that illustrate how quantitative approaches can be used in ways that are consistent with a human science approach to the field, and (2) providing critical examination of the motivating idea-and introduce the articles in the issue that address each of these objectives. In the final section of this introductory article, we offer our thoughts about what the full set of papers accomplishes and suggest that the issue's many-sided exploration goes some distance toward changing the terms of the quantitative-qualitative debate.