This section included a general discussion on methods, then provided a brief overview of the 2 main types.
Make sure to choose a design that’s appropriate for your project
Research tends to fall broadly into one approach or the other, and is often not entirely quantitative or qualitative
Make sure to avoid using the language of one approach when you are using the other. Example: talking about “proving” something when using a qualitative approach isn’t appropriate
Continuum from Quantitative ↔ Qualitative
- Predetermined ↔ Unfolding
- Tight design ↔ Emerging
- Architectural / blueprint ↔ Open ended
Planning your research design
- Often begins with an identified gap in the literature → initial research question
- What do you want to find out?
- What is the purpose of your study?
- What are the questions you want to address?
- What methods can you use to answer these questions (data collection / analysis)?
Identify the problem and then choose a method, rather than deciding from the outset what type of research you want to do
Overview of quantitative research: what types of questions can quantitative research answer?
- Give an overview of information with regard to a population
- Measuring the extent of something using numerical values
- Identify trends over time
- Measure attitudes / opinions of large groups e.g. political surveys
- There is a tightly designed structure that comes before implementing the research to ensure that one is measuring what one intends to measure
- There are clear variables
- You would define concepts
- Formulate measures or indicators for assessing outcomes
Often makes a claim of a causal relationship between 2 variables that requires:
- Control for interfering variables
- Sample and control groups
- Period of time in which to run the intervention
- Pre- and post-test
- What statistical tests can you run to analyse data
- What results would be significant
- What can one claim based on the sample size
- Can your results be generalised to a larger population?
Overview of qualitative research: what types of questions can qualitative research answer?
- Aim to gain more understanding of people, processes, organisations and relationships
- Naturalistic approach, research something within a natural context in it’s full complexity i.e. not trying to control for interfering variables
- Aims for depth, rather than breadth → limits how many cases one can study i.e. not a large population
- Sceptical about the concept of objectivity i.e. acknowledges that the researcher comes to the project with a background and their own values and doesn’t try to completely eliminate bias
- Don’t claim that findings are generalisable
- Tends to have a more flexible design, open-ended and iterative process
- Data analysis → codes for analysis and themes are derived from the data
- May apply initial theory to data analysis (deductive research)
- May use grounded theory → themes emerge from the data and influences the conceptual framework (inductive research)
- Often there is a combination of deductive and inductive research