Running ahead: COMPARING QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES 1

Comparing Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

Hassan H. Elkatawneh

Doctor of Philosophy PPA - Terrorism Mediation & Peace

Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Arab Organization for Mediation and Conflict

Resolution

Walden University; University of the Rockies

Date: 03/05/2016

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Comparing Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

The discussion will compare the characteristic of both kinds of research, including their

purpose, research question and hypothesis, data, analysis, and the final report.

The purpose of qualitative research is to explore the meaning of the people’s experiences,

the meaning of people’s culture, and how the people view a particular issue or case. The purpose

of the quantitative research is to examine the relationship between variables, such as the dependent,

independent variables, and extraneous (Creswell, 2009).

The qualitative research is an exploratory nature, so the qualitative research questions

usually start with the words, such as WHAT, or HOW. Since these words imply discovery your

exploration, because of the qualitative research is exploratory it typically does not have a

hypothesis, while the hypothesis is a predication in nature, and the qualitative research tries to

explore not predict participant views. Similar to the qualitative research, quantitative research

question can start with the word WHAT and WHY, but they might also include the word DOES

in the beginning of the question, in the descriptive quantitative research, the research question asks

how much, how often, what is the relation between variables, what is the difference between

variables. Compared to the qualitative research, quantitative research does have hypotheses or

predictions about what will happen in the study (Creswell, 2009).

Typically in quantitative research, researchers collect more than one type of data in order

to get a better and more holistic picture about what is going on in the field, while the data used in

the qualitative research is almost always in what people say or in words. This data usually comes

from interviews, documents like newspaper or journals... etc., observation and audiovisual

materials such as videos or audio. The researcher usually obtains multiple type of these kind data

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in order to answer the research question, whereas all of this data comes from the field, which means

the natural setting where the participants are. In qualitative research, researchers go into the field

and spend a lot of time there and interviewing observing the participants and their environments.

It is also important to note that surveys or questionnaire also known as an instrument, while in

qualitative research there is no instruments, no surveys. In qualitative research the researcher acts

as an instrument by asking all the questions, collect observation instead of relying on surveys to

gather data. It is also important to note that a Hallmark a qualitative research it is emergent design,

this means the way in which the study is conducted can change during the study. During qualitative

research may become apparent other forms of data from other group of people should be included

into the study. The data from quantitative research is in the form of number, these numbers usually

come from what people check off in an instrument which is surveyed, questionnaire or

observations check list. So qualitative research looks at words quantitative research looks at

numbers (Creswell, 2009).

The qualitative research analysis is all about creating themes, researchers read their

interviews, look at document, observations, and audiovisual materials and then organize all that

data of those words into themes, which it can take a considerable amount of time. It is important

to note that the qualitative research is inductive in nature, which means that the research questions,

the data collection, the data analysis is not based on a theory or preconceived notions that the

researcher has, the researcher let the data speak for itself, and form itself into themes without the

bias of an existing theory. On the other hand quantitative research analysis involves the use of

statistics to crunch numbers and figure out what those numbers mean in term of answering research

questions. Qualitative research looks at themes, quantitative research and analysis crunches

numbers, statistic. Quantitative research is also usually deductive, it is based from existing theories

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COMPARING QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES 4

and information that already out there to help form research questions and how data is collected

and how it analyzed (Creswell, 2009).

In the qualitative research the final report is usually narrative in nature, the authors

sometimes write in the first person, it is more interpretive and contains a lot of writing, and has

direct quotes from participants. The final report of the quantitative research are more rigid and

more in the form of a statistical report (Creswell, 2009).

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COMPARING QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES 5

References

Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method

approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

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