An Enquiry to The Basis of Quantitative and Qualitative Research Designs

Niceliksel ve niteliksel araştırma yöntemlerinin, epistemolojik ve tarihsel temellerine yönelik kaleme aldığım bir inceleme

key words: scientific method, epistemology, historical development, quantitative, qualitative, research

08.12.2021

Scientists developed several methods to test their hypothesis — assumptions according to their questions— to generate answers about what they have wondered. Scientific method is consisted of these differentiating procedures. Seeking relationship between pre-determined assumptions is one of the approaches of the scientific method. It is called correlational study (Carter, D., 2009). While conducting a research study, the researcher may choose to study with quantitative data or qualitative data or both. The qualitative approach to the data gathering was neglected in the history because of the possible erroneous contribution of the subjective experience to the analysis procedure (Given, L., 2008). Thus, with post-modern period, the qualitative method is started to be considered more in the research methodology especially for the area of social sciences. It is because of the changing social and moral attitude toward subjective experience. However, the quantitative approach to data was the fundamental understanding of the data gathering and analysis in the history. Its empirical way of quantifying the observation, its convenience with the statistical procedures and its applicability to large population has made the quantitative approach the trendy way of the data studies also for the social sciences.

Furthermore, there was historical acts, and philosophical movements in the past which gave rise to the idea “quantifying the nature”. In the ancient-Greece and 13th-18th century of the Europe, significant improvements had occurred about the idea of epistemology; it is about the developing ideas of “how to know something” and “the knowledge itself” in the nature. Today, the scientific method has become an important way for to systematically ask, analyse and answer questions.

Curiosity among humankind drives humanbeings to ask questions about the things which they encounter along their lifetime. These were mostly naive acts of the earlier history. These questions were tried to be answered with the intrinsic, random, and fundamental experiments of the sensory experiences. However, there were people who also interested about intrinsic thought processes. They were asking questions like; how can someone know something, is knowledge knowable? What is the possibility of human understanding, can human capable to know or to understand what is occurring? How is something occurring or existing? All these types of epistemological questions asked to the nature itself and to the mind itself by the influential figures in the history (The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2020). These attempts were the important footsteps for the today’s scientific method.

In addition to the philosophers' school of thought, the discovery of the continent America has significantly effected the development of the social sciences. Early ethnographers' attempts to understand the new people they found at the “new world”, and the colonialisms’ goal to civilize the new world has given rise to the quantifying approaches of the humanities (Given, 2008).

Moreover, with modernist age (1950- 1970) and post-modern period (1990-1995) advancements of the industry and growing competition in the market, made the quantizable data more important. With the civilization of the communities, the population of humankind increased rapidly, which is resulted with the more brains, more questions, more data, and more answers. As a result of this, people felt in need to ask questions, gather data, and try to answer these questions with more structural and systematic way.

To establish systematic answer seeking procedure, it is important to rigorously identify what the question is. The curios person must decide how to gather relevant data and how to study the data for answering the certain question properly. To conduct structural procedure for answering a question, the question must specify its limits to a particular area of interest to studying it more concisely (Eco, 1977). As an example, “why some people are better at coping work related stress?” is a question that does not give its precise point to search and gather data about. In contrast, “does adverse childhood experiences affect secondary traumatization of the healthcare professionals?” is a question is more suitable to conceptualize and study. This second example of the research question could be more easily shaped into the hypothesis form to test and infer a theory from. Thinking the question as hypothesis helps the researcher to decide on what the method of the research will be (Carter, D., 2009). For this example, the hypothesis can be “the healthcare professionals are more prone to affected by the secondary trauma possibly due to the adverse childhood experiences”. Here, this hypothesis can even more easily show the concept of the research and how to study it rather than thinking only with the research question. From this point of view, researcher can conduct the method by testing the hypothesis; whether the hypothesis is true or false, in other words, it is accepted or rejected. When the hypothesis assumes that there is relationship between the two things —the variables that the hypothesis is indicating to the researcher— the correlational study could be conducted to quantify this relationship and to measure how reliable and valid the correlation is (Carter, D., 2009). With this example hypothesis, “the secondary trauma scale’s scores” obtained by the participants are assumed to be dependent on “the adverse childhood experiences questionnaire results”. Here, the correlational analysis will be focus on the statistical coherency between these two standardized scales’ results. This point brings us to the method of the research, the quantitative methods.

The experimenting, question asking, and observation are the three sub-strategies of the quantitative method. For experimenting, the situation in the study must be manipulated, whereas absence of manipulation is important for the measurement with the question asking and the observation procedures (Carter, D., 2009). The researcher uses these strategies according to the variables indicated by the hypothesis. Particularly for the given example, the researcher needs to use standardized measures, which are the important instrument of the question asking procedure. Interpreting the relationship between “adverse childhood experiences” and “secondary traumatic stress”, two different standardized measurement scales scores obtained from the participants. As a part of the quantitative method, a correlational analysis was conducted with these scores of the measurements to interpret whether there is a relationship between the scale scores or not.

However, the standardized measures, as used in the research example, may not be able to reveal possible individual differences for the researcher to infer from. Thus, the researcher could choose to overcome this issue by conducting qualitative analysis.

The qualitative method strategies aim to structure its analysis by the context and the linguistic meaning of the data gathered (Bryman, A., Burgess, R., G., 1994). The qualitative research by itself does not include any numeric data and statistical analysis, which makes it more useful to study participants specifically. Moreover, it is hard to think the methodology —”the framework of the analysis”— and the method —”the instruments of the framework”— separately for the qualitative research. The methods which are used to gather data are generally structures the framework of the research itself (Braun, V., Clarke, V., 2013). As a result of this, the meaning for useful knowledge can be interpreted from the small samples with the qualitative paradigm. The qualitative strategies such as content analysis, grounded theory, discourse analysis and IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis) could be applied for conceptualizing the data and its analysis for the research question. All these strategies share similar goal of the understanding the contextual meaning provided by the certain participant to infer a subtle perspective towards the studied sample (Braun, V., Clarke, V., 2013). Rather than inferring from the numerical correlation of the variances of standardized scales, inferring the meaning from the participants’ specific answers could help understanding the relationship more precisely. Although, studying qualitatively with the small sample size makes the inferences more subjective in contrast to the quantitative study.

References

Bryman, A., Burgess, R., G., (1994). Analyzing Qualitative Data, 3-6. Routledge, ISBN: 9780415060639.

Braun, V., Clarke, V., (2013). Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners, 27-32. SAGE Publications, 1st Edition, ISBN: 9781847875822.

Carter, D., (2009). Quantitative Psychological Research: The Complete Student's Companion, 21-33, 284-285. Psychology Press, ISBN: 9781841696911.

Eco, U., (1977). How to Write A Thesis, 89-138. Can Yayinlari, ISBN: 9789750736452. Given, L., M., (2008).

The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods, 255-257. Sage Publications, ISBN: 9781412941631.