Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research in Social Science

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.

Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2013

At the level of methods, quantitative researchers criticize qualitative researchers for not performing null hypothesis significance tests. However, I review literature showing that these are invalid, and so it is not particularly meaningful to criticize a lack of performance of something that should not be performed anyhow. More generally, I suggest that there are strengths and limitations to quantitative and qualitative methods. The more interesting question pertains to goals, and quantitative and qualitative researchers differ there, too. I briefly mention some limitations of the usual quantitative goal, which is to find causal mechanisms. But a typical qualitative goal of describing personal or subjective experience also has limitations. Finally, I compare both quantitative and qualitative social science research to physics and show that each has similarities and differences. There is much for quantitative and qualitative social science researchers to gain, not only by considering each other's methods and goals carefully but also by going outside social science and considering the accomplishments in nonsocial sciences.

New Directions for Program Evaluation, 1994

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.

Educational Researcher, 1987

The current debate about quantitative and quahtative methods focuses on whether there is a necessary connection between method-type and research paradigm that makes the &fferent approaches mcompahble. This paper argues that part of the ~i onnection is rhetorical. Quanktatwe methods express the ssumptwns of a posltwlst paradigm whzch holds that behavior /. can be explained through objective facts. Design and mstrumenta-~--kon p_ersuade by shozvmg how bias and error are eliminated. ~Quahtahve~nethods express the assu,~nphons~of a /~henomenol-~ogi-I cal para&gm that there are mulhple realities that are socially '~ defined. Rich descnphon persuades by showing that the researcher was immersed m the setting an~l ~wm~. the reader enoueh detad l~to 'make sense" of the sztuahon. Whde rhetorically_different, ?"the results of---~the tw~dologzes can be"co~Ipleme'~Jary. [Examples are drawn from tzvo studies using different ~, methodologies to study the same problem.

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

By means of the previously introduced Research Pyramid this chapter provides a concise overview of the quantitative research approach. The essence of quantitative research is to use a 'theory' to frame and thus understand the problem at hand. Its starting point if not focus can be to contribute to the development of theory. It is grounded in the basic attitude that knowledge about reality can also be obtained 'through the eyes of the researcher'. It is he who elaborates theory based on findings. In order to make this happen theory is most often translated into a conceptual model and elaborated predominantly by means of hypotheses. For the researcher conducting quantitative research implies carefully operationalising a theory and subsequently measuring it by means of variables and questions. He needs to justify the way in which he has designed and operationalised the research methodologically and technically. 1

International Journal of Value-based Management, 2000

A great deal of criticism has been aimed at empirical-analytic research because of its narrow focus. However, a similar criticism can be leveled at qualitative research. The purpose of this manuscript is not to champion one approach at the expense of the other, but rather to focus on discussing the assumptions of each methodological approach in terms of metaphorical thinking.