qualitative methods

(noun)

Qualitative research is a method of inquiry employed in many different academic disciplines, traditionally in the social sciences, but also in market research and further contexts. Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, and when. Hence, smaller but focused samples are more often needed than large samples.

Related Terms

Examples of qualitative methods in the following topics:

  • Determining the Research Design

    • One of the most intensive forms of qualitative research is participant observation.
    • Another distinction can be made between quantitative methods and qualitative methods.
    • Quantitative methods are generally useful when a researcher seeks to study large-scale patterns of behavior, while qualitative methods are often more effective when dealing with interactions and relationships in detail .
    • Qualitative methods are often used to develop a deeper understanding of a particular phenomenon.
    • These two researchers are debating the relative merits of using qualitative or quantitative methods to study social phenomena such as the learning processes of children.

  • Tradition vs. Science

    • Social scientists began to adopt the scientific method to make sense of the rapid changes accompanying modernization and industrialization.
    • Quantitative and qualitative methods can be complementary: often, quantitative methods are used to describe large or general patterns in society while qualitative approaches are used to help explain how individuals understand those patterns.
    • To find out why, the sociologist may need to employ qualitative methods, such as interviews.
    • A common sense explanation of the quantitative findings might be that welfare recipients are lazy and prefer not to work, but using qualitative methods and the sociological imagination, the investigator could find that women strategically choose not to work because the cost of childcare would mean less net income.
    • Sociology embodies several tensions, such as those between quantitative and qualitative methods, between positivist and interpretive orientations, and between objective and critical approaches.

  • Quantitative and Qualitative

    • Like the distinction drawn between positivist sociology and Verstehen sociology, there is - as noted above in the elaboration of general scientific methods - often a distinction drawn between two types of sociological investigation: quantitative and qualitative.
    • Qualitative methods of sociological research tend to approach social phenomena from the Verstehen perspective.
    • While qualitative methods may be used to propose or explore relationships between variables, these studies typically focus on explicating the realities people experience that lie at the heart or foundation of such relationships rather than focusing on the relationships themselves.
    • Qualitatively oriented sociologists tend to employ different methods of data collection and analysis, including: participant observation, interviews, focus groups, content analysis, visual sociology, and historical comparison.
    • For example, quantitative methods could describe large or general patterns in society while qualitative approaches could help to explain how individuals understand those patterns.

  • Sociology Today

    • Contemporary sociology does not have a single overarching foundation—it has varying methods, both qualitative and quantitative.
    • Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques.

  • The Scientific Method

    • The method is commonly taken as the underlying logic of scientific practice.
    • The essential elements of a scientific method are iterations and recursions of the following four steps:
    • A scientific method depends upon a careful characterization of the subject of the investigation.
    • Similarly, the scope of initial observations may be recorded via count and / or qualitative assessments of the nature and method of previous studies, which allows researchers to expand and / or replicate categorizations dependent upon and contextualized via a specific scope of observational data.
    • Thus, while the true experiment is ideally suited for the performance of quantitative science, especially because it is the best quantitative method for deriving causal relationships, other methods of hypothesis testing are commonly employed in the social sciences, and qualitative methods of critique and analysis are utilized to fact check the assumptions and theories created upon the basis of "controlled" (rather than natural) circumstances.

  • Defining the Sample and Collecting Data

    • Defining the sample and collecting data are key parts of all empirical research, both qualitative and quantitative.
    • Social scientists employ a range of methods in order to analyze a vast breadth of social phenomena.
    • Many empirical forms of sociological research follow the scientific method .
    • The choice of method often depends largely on what the researcher intends to investigate.
    • Sampling can be used in both quantitative and qualitative research.

  • Analyzing Data and Drawing Conclusions

    • One way in which analysis often varies is by the quantitative or qualitative nature of the data.
    • In practice, the performance of regression analysis methods depends on the form of the data generating process and how it relates to the regression approach being used.
    • However, in many applications, especially with small effects or questions of causality based on observational data, regression methods give misleading results.
    • Coding is the process of categorizing qualitative data so that the data becomes quantifiable and thus measurable.
    • Qualitative data can be coded, or sorted into categories.

  • Intorduction to qualitative analysis

    • In cases like this, the scaling methods discussed above can be applied, but one should be very cautious about the results.
    • This is because the various dimensional methods operate on similarity/distance matrices, and measures like correlations (as used in two-mode factor analysis) can be misleading with binary data.

  • Sociology and Science

    • Early sociological studies were thought to be similar to the natural sciences due to their use of empiricism and the scientific method.
    • The effect of employing the scientific method and stressing empiricism was the distinction of sociology from theology, philosophy, and metaphysics.
    • Arriving at a verstehen-like understanding of society thus involves not only quantitative approaches, but more interpretive, qualitative approaches.
    • Qualitative sociology generally opts for depth over breadth.
    • Drawing a hard and fast distinction between quantitative and qualitative sociology is a bit misleading, however.

  • Categorical REGE for geodesic distances (Padgett's marriage data)

    • The categorical REGE algorithm (Network>Roles & Positions>Maximal Regular>CATREGE) can be used to identify regularly equivalent actors by treating the elements of the geodesic distance matrix as describing "types" of ties -- that is different geodesic distances are treated as "qualitatively" rather than "quantitatively" different.
    • Figure 15.7 shows the results of regular equivalence analysis where geodesic distances have been used to represent multiple qualitative types of relations among actors.
    • If geodesic distances can be used to represent differences in the types of ties (and this is a conceptual question), and if the actors do have some variability in their distances, this method can produce meaningful results.