Prelim and Handouts

UNIT I – NATURE OF INQUIRY AND RESEARCH •
INQUIRY vs. RESEARCH: A REVIEW

Nature of Inquiry and Research
One goal of education is knowledge acquisition. However, education is not
just stocking your brain with knowledge, but it also encourages you to use
acquired knowledge for a deeper understanding of the world—an understanding
that inspires you to create, construct, or produce things for the betterment of not
only your own life, but of the whole world as well. How is this possible?
Inquiry, a term that is synonymous with the word ‘investigation,’ is the
answer to this question. When you inquire or investigate, you tend to ask
questions to probe or examine something. You do this kind of examination
through your HOTS or higher-order thinking strategies of inferential, analytical,
critical, creative, and appreciative thinking to discover more understandable or
meaningful things beyond such object of your inquiry. Thinking in this manner
makes you ask open- ended questions to elicit views, opinions, and beliefs of
others in relation to your research. (Small 2012)
Characteristics of Research
Research is a scientific, experimental, or inductive manner of thinking.
Starting from particular to more complex ideas, you execute varied thinking acts
that range from lower-order to higher-order thinking strategies reflected by
these research activities: identifying the topic or problem, gather ing data,
making theories, formulating hypotheses, analyzing data, and drawing
conclusions. Cognitively driven terms like empirical, logical, cyclical,
analytical, critical, methodical, and replicable are the right descriptive words
to characterize research. These powerful modifiers that your previous
research subject, Practical Research 1, explained to a certain extent, are the
very same terms to characterize any quantitative research you intend to carry
out this time. The data you work on in research do not come mainly from
yourself but also from other sources of knowledge like people, books, and
artworks, among others. Hence, one cardinal principle in research is to give
acknowledgment to owners of all sources of knowledge involved in your
research work. Giving credit to people from whom you derived your data is
your way of not only thanking the authors of their contribution to the field,
but also establishing the validity and reliability of the findings of your
research that ought to serve as instrument for world progress. (Muijs 2011;
Ransome 2012)
Methods of Research
To be a researcher is to be a scientist, who must think logically or
systematically; that is, your research activities must follow a certain order,
like doing inductive thinking that makes you ponder on specific ideas first,
then move to more complex concepts like conclusions or generalizations. Or,
do the opposite of inductive thinking which is deductive thinking that lets you
start from forming generalizations to examining details about the subject
matter. These are not the only approaches, though, that you can adhere to in
planning your research work. Depending on your topic and purpose, you are
free to choose from several approaches, methods, and types of research you
learned in your previous research subject, Practical Research 1. (Gray 2011;
Sharp 2012)
Inquiry vis-à-vis Research
One scholarly activity that greatly involves inquiry is research. Similar to

inquiry that starts from what you are ignorant about, research makes you
learn something by means of a problem-solving technique. Both inquiry and
research encourage you to formulate questions to direct you to the exact
information you want to discover about the object of your curiosity. Your
questions operate like a scrutiny of a person’s attire to find out what are
hidden between or among the compartments or folded parts of his/her
clothes. Although the core word for both inquiry and research is investigation
or questioning, they are not exactly the same in all aspects. Research
includes more complex acts of investigation than inquiry because the former
follows a scientific procedure of discovering truths or meanings about things
in this world. (Goodwin 2014; Lapan 2012)
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
Definition of Quantitative Research

Expressions like numerical forms, objective thinking, statistical methods,
and measurement signal the existence of quantitative research. One word
that reflects the true nature of this type of research is numerical. This term,
numerical, is a descriptive word pertaining to or denoting a number or symbol
to express how many, how much, or what rank things are or have in this
world. Expressing meaning through numerals or a set of symbols indicates
specificity, particularity, or exactness of something.
Quantitative research makes you focus your mind on specific things by
means of statistics that involve collection and study of numerical data. Thus,
to give the basic meaning of quantitative research is to say that research is a
way of making any phenomenon or any sensory experience clearer or more
meaningful by gathering and examining facts and information about such
person, thing, place, or event appealing to your senses. You use mathematical
operations of addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication to study and
express relationships between quantities or magnitudes shown by numbers or
symbols. Involving measurements and amounts, quantitative research seeks
to find answers to questions starting with how many, how much, how long, to
what extent, and the like. Answers to these questions come in numerals,
percentages, and fractions, among others. (Suter 2012; Russell
20Characteristics
Since quantitative research uses numbers and figures to denote a
particular thing, this kind of research requires you to focus your full attention
on the object of your study. Doing this, you tend to exclude your own thoughts
and feelings about the subject or object. This is why quantitative research is
described as objective research in contrast to qualitative research that is
subjective. Characterized by objectiveness, in which only the real or factual,
not the emotional or cognitive existence of the object matters greatly to the
artist, quantitative research is analogous to scientific or experimental
thinking. In this case, you just do not identify problems but theorize,
hypothesize, analyze, infer, and create as well. Quantitative research usually
happens in hard sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine;

qualitative research, in soft sciences such as humanities, social sciences,
education, and psychology, among others.
Classification
Quantitative research is of two kinds: experimental and non-experimental.
Each of these has sub-types. Falling under experimental are these specific
types: true experimental, quasi-experimental, single subject, and pre-
experimental. Quasi-experimental comes in several types such as: matched
comparative group, time series, and counterbalanced quasi-experimental.
Non-experimental research, on the other hand, has these sub-types: survey,
historical, observational, correlational, descriptive, and comparative research.
Importance
The importance of quantitative research lies greatly in the production of
results that should reflect precise measurement and an in-depth analysis of
data. It is also useful in obtaining an objective understanding of people,
things, places, and events in this world; meaning, attaching accurate or exact
meanings to objects or subjects, rather than inflated meanings resulting from
the researcher’s bias or personal attachment to things related to the
research. Requiring the use of reliable measurement instruments or
statistical methods, a quantitative study enables people to study their
surroundings as objective as they can. This kind of research is likewise an
effective method to obtain information about specified personality traits of a
group member or of the group as a whole as regards the extent of the
relationship of their characteristics and the reason behind the instability of
some people’s characteristics. (Muijs 2011; Gray 2012)
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research

Having obtained much knowledge about qualitative and quantitative
research, you are now able to compare and contrast the two based on some
standards or criteria appearing in the following table. (Muijs 2011; Sharp
2012)
Standards Qualitative Quantitative

Mental survey of Results from social Exists in the physical
reality interactions world
Cause-effect Explained by people’s Revealed by
relationships objective desires automatic
descriptions of
circumstances or
conditions
Standard Qualitative Quantitative

s
Researcher’s Subjective; sometimes Objective;
involvement personally engaged least
with the object involvemen
or subject of the t by the

study researcher
Expression of Verbal language (words, Numerals, statistics
data, data visuals, objects)
analysis, and
findings
Research plan Takes place as the Plans all research
research proceeds aspects before
gradually collecting data
Behavior Desires to preserve the Control or
toward natural setting of manipulation of
research research features research conditions
aspects/ by the researcher
conditions
Obtaining Multiple methods Scientific method
knowledge
Purpose Makes social Evaluates objective
intentions sand examines
understandable cause-effect
relationships
Data- Thematic codal Mathematically
analysis ways, based methods
technique competence-
based
Style of Personal, lacks formality Impersonal, scientific,
expression or
systematic
Sampling More inclined to Random sampling as
technique purposive sampling or the
use of chosen samples most preferred
based on some criteria

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UNIT I – NATURE OF INQUIRY AND RESEARCH •

INQUIRY vs. RESEARCH: A REVIEW

Inquiry vis-à-vis Research

One scholarly activity that greatly involves inquiry is research. Similar to

Definition of Quantitative Research

happens in hard sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine;

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research

Standards Qualitative Quantitative

Standard Qualitative Quantitative

or subject of the t by the

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