Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g.
, text, video, or
audio) to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights
into a problem or generate new ideas for research.
Qualitative research is the opposite of quantitative research, which involves collecting and
analyzing numerical data for statistical analysis.
Qualitative research is commonly used in the humanities and social sciences, in subjects such as
anthropology, sociology, education, health sciences, history, etc.
Qualitative research methods
Each of the research approaches involve using one or more data collection methods. These are
some of the most common qualitative methods:
 Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field

notes.
 Interviews: personally asking people questions in one-on-one conversations.
 Focus groups: asking questions and generating discussion among a group of people.
 Surveys: distributing questionnaires with open-ended questions.
 Secondary research: collecting existing data in the form of texts, images, audio or video
recordings, etc.
Research exampleTo research the culture of a large tech company, you decide to take an
ethnographic approach. You work at the company for several months and use various methods to
gather data:
 You take field notes with observations and reflect on your own experiences of the
company culture.
 You distribute open-ended surveys to employees across all the company’s offices by
email to find out if the culture varies across locations.
 You conduct in-depth interviews with employees in your office to learn about their
experiences and perspectives in greater detail.
Qualitative researchers often consider themselves “instruments” in research because all
observations, interpretations and analyses are filtered through their own personal lens.
For this reason, when writing up your methodology for qualitative research, it’s important to
reflect on your approach and to thoroughly explain the choices you made in collecting and
analyzing the data.
Qualitative data analysis
Qualitative data can take the form of texts, photos, videos and audio. For example, you might be
working with interview transcripts, survey responses, fieldnotes, or recordings from natural
settings.
Most types of qualitative data analysis share the same five steps:
1. Prepare and organize your data. This may mean transcribing interviews or typing up

fieldnotes.
2. Review and explore your data. Examine the data for patterns or repeated ideas that
emerge.
3. Develop a data coding system. Based on your initial ideas, establish a set of codes that
you can apply to categorize your data.
4. Assign codes to the data. For example, in qualitative survey analysis, this may mean
going through each participant’s responses and tagging them with codes in a spreadsheet.
As you go through your data, you can create new codes to add to your system if
necessary.
5. Identify recurring themes. Link codes together into cohesive, overarching themes.
There are several specific approaches to analyzing qualitative data. Although these methods
share similar processes, they emphasize different concepts.
Qualitative data analysis ApproachWhen to useExampleContent analysisTo describe and

categorize common words, phrases, and ideas in qualitative data.A market researcher could
perform content analysis to find out what kind of language is used in descriptions of therapeutic
apps.Thematic analysisTo identify and interpret patterns and themes in qualitative data.A
psychologist could apply thematic analysis to travel blogs to explore how tourism shapes self-
identity.Textual analysisTo examine the content, structure, and design of texts.A media
researcher could use textual analysis to understand how news coverage of celebrities has
changed in the past decade.Discourse analysisTo study communication and how language is used
to achieve effects in specific contexts.A political scientist could use discourse analysis to study
how politicians generate trust in election campaigns.
Quantitative research
, is defined as a the systematicinvestigation of phenomena by gathering quantifiabledata and
performing statistical, mathematical orcomputational techniques.Quantitative
researchgathers information from existing and potentialcustomers usingsampling methodsand
sendingoutonline surveys,online polls,questionnairesetc.,the results of which can be depicted in
the form
Quantitative data is defined as the value of data in the form of counts or numbers where
each data-set has an unique numerical value associated with it. This data is any
quantifiable information that can be used for mathematical calculations and statistical
analysis, such that real-life decisions can be made based on these mathematical
derivations. Quantitative data is used to answer questions such as “How many?”, “How
often?”, “How much?”. This data can be verified and can also be conveniently evaluated
using mathematical techniques.

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Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g.

Qualitative research methods

 Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field

Qualitative data analysis

1. Prepare and organize your data. This may mean transcribing interviews or typing up

Qualitative data analysis ApproachWhen to useExampleContent analysisTo describe and

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