QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research is designed to get a better understanding to people’s ideas on a topic and what they think based on personal experiences and their feelings. It is helpful as it can tell us how people feel and why they feel as they do. It is useful for example in a shop, deciding whether to keep a certain brand of clothing as surveys from customers could show how happy they are with the product. It is concerned with collecting in-depth information asking questions such as why do you say that? About a certain topic. Samples tend to be smaller compared with quantitative projects that include much larger samples. Depth interviews or group discussions are two common methods used for collecting qualitative information. Examples of qualitative research are things such as, interviews, diaries, or things like a questionnaire of a poll to get information from the public.

Advantages of qualitative research

The good thing about qualitative research is that it is easy accessible to anyone as you can just make a questionnaire about what you want to know and get feedback from anyone easily. It’s also good as you get to know people’s thoughts and feelings about a topic and if it’s needed for a documentary for example if the documentary consists of following a certain group of people around in the daily lives, you gain insight into their lives and you gain experience and information you can use from that.

Disadvantages of qualitative research

The disadvantages of qualitative research is  that the opinions aren’t facts and a person could be lying or the information they give could not be useable, for example if you asked for an opinion on a film and all they said was “it’s really good” you can’t use that opinion as it doesn’t explain why they like it. It could also be unreliable as sources could be bias to a topic that you asked their opinion of, so they may not give an honest answer on the question if they are strongly against or for it, so sometimes qualitative analysis isn’t always reliable so having a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research is best.

What is quantitative research?

Quantitative research is numerical data or data that can be converted into numbers, for example clinical trials or the National Census, which counts people and households. Quantitative research can also be used to measure attitudes, satisfaction, commitment and a range of other useful market data and market metrics that can tracked over time and used as part of a wider business planning and business strategy process. Instead of opinions it is more factual, so is useful for business when seeing for example how much stock is being sold in a period of time, and what periods of time is stock more popular than others. Examples of quantitative research include graphs, tallies and statistics.

Advantages of quantitative research

An advantage of quantitative research is that it will provide reliable information in terms of accuracy, so if a company wants more realistic results then quantitative research is better, as qualitative research can be unreliable and it just opinion not fact. It reduces the bias because again it isn’t people opinions so it wouldn’t be a lie or is unusable; it is proper gathered together information. It is also quick to use, as the information provided can be put into things like tallies, graphs etc, so there for it would be quicker to get hold of, rather than trying to sort together different opinions.

Disadvantages of quantitative research

The disadvantages of quantitative research is that where it’s more statistical, it will lack insight into the meaning, feelings and motivations of the public, it will lack opinions of generally what people think of an idea or company. Also it will need constant updating. Being factual it will change overtime and there for if it is not changed, the statistics of a company for example will change and then be unreliable to use as it would be old statistics.

The documentary “SUPERSIZE ME” uses quantitative alongside with qualitative research in the opening sequence of the documentary for an eye-opening introduction to the topic choice and to try and get people interested in the documentary. It says things qualitative research such as when  Morgan Spurlock is questioning people on the street, he asks them if they eat McDonalds and if so how often, and one woman said she wouldn’t here because it doesn’t seem clean. This is qualitative as it is someone’s opinion and the opinion could change at any time. Other qualitative answers was when Morgan asked people about American’s suing McDonalds for making them fat, one man said “If these fast food places can put their signs up, if I can walk by them and just totally ignore them and say I’m not hungry I don’t need this, they can do it too” Another man said “I think there’s a lot of focus on the fast food companies because they are mentioned more than vertically all the other causes, in most of the articles, books and studies are about why it’s a sudden epidemic, again it can’t be the neighbourhood restaurant, we’ve had neighbourhood restaurants for hundreds of years, it can’t be the foods we eat at home, we’ve been eating at home for hundreds of years” These would be useful in an argument against fast food as they are the average people’s opinions, but as I said before they can become unreliable as they could quickly change and would need updating. “SUPERSIZE ME” uses more quantitative research more than qualitative, to get the fact and realism over to the audience. It says from the very beginning facts such as nearly 100 million Americans are today either overweight or obese, and that that’s more than 60% of all US adults. It also shows pictures to back up the facts, a good one was showing two animated girls side by side, the first one been a 14 year old girl and 4ft 10, you see balloon to 170 pound, and then the other being 19 years old, 5ft 6, you see balloon to 270 pounds. This is a good way to represent the facts as reading pages of facts and hearing them all the time at once can be boring, so showing animations to go with them engages the viewer and proves the point the fact is trying to make.