Today, no field or domain is untapped by research. Continuous efforts are done to unwrap new tools and methodologies to perform research. Not just the skillset it’s also important to work on the way to approach a particular problem.
It is of utmost important to work on various aspects of professional study or work. In the world of curious minds wanting to get them of all the questions, it’s important to systematically examine all the aspects with a view of answering all the answers with more accuracy and results-driven maximum out of the data present everywhere. Therefore it’s necessary to tools and techniques available and which and when to use. Research methods are broadly divided into quantitative and qualitative methods.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative Research is essentially an exploratory investigation.it helps to gain and get insights into the underlying reasons. It not only helps in getting insights into the data and the problem but also helps in developing ideas and hypotheses for quantitative research methods.
It is fundamentally used to find and increase in-depth knowledge of individual encounters, considerations, suppositions, and patterns, and to delve further into the current issue.
Data is collected using group discussions, personal interviews, volunteer participation, and observations.the sample size is relatively small and all the respondents are selected in order to perform research. The time is taken to collect data, perform analysis and then interpret the results are comparatively very time-consumingWe need an expert to interpret the qualitative data.
Analysis of qualitative data is intricate, and expert understanding of a field is essential to try to interpret qualitative data. As quantitative research explicitly defines what is included and how it is covered to reveal trends, for example, behaviour, cognition, motivation, emotion, quantitative data collection is much more structured than qualitative approaches.
Quantitative Research
Quantitative research uses numerical data or data that can be transformed into useful statistics. It is applied to quantify attitudes, opinions, responses, and other defined variables and conclude results from a more general sample population. Quantitative research uses data to formulate facts and uncover trends in the research. Quantitative data are much more structured than Qualitative data collection methods. Data collection techniques include various forms of surveys – online surveys, mobile surveys and kiosk surveys, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, website interceptors and methodical observations.
In the researcher’s research, quantitative data tells us what is done by users whereas qualitative data helps to understand why did they do that? What are their intentions? etc all the question can be answered using statistical methods
Let’s take an example. If we have to measure user pattern on a website, you might learn that 36% of people clicked on the button, then the other button so and so forth. We will split test to try out different version to check variations in peoples’ behaviour. That’s good to know, we can run split tests to try out different versions of your implementation to see if you can change people’s behaviour for the better.Still, this data doesn’t tell us why people did what they did.
Qualitative research focuses more on the human angle, i.e. their thinking and feeling? What’s their motive for doing this? What’s their attitude or knowledge of something? You can get much richer/more in-depth experience with qualitative data because you can learn the intention behind this action.