Critique on quantitative research and qualitative research TINGTING WANG 1904877 Introduction Method is an essential support for the significance of claims made in scientific study. Authors have to spend a lot of time on evaluating and picking the suitable method. And the principles behind the set of methods used in called methodology First, methods are not primarily for the purpose of satisfying technical criteria, but rather to bring us closer to what it is we are trying to understand. Closer in every sense: more intimately, holistically and directly; more truthfully; more comprehensively….Second, methods…help us verify: to make what we think we have discovered though exploration more plausible and probable. Third, methods are also here to discover objective truth about the world through assembling evidence, making testable statements, generalizable propositions, coherent arguments, and so forth….Fourth, methods exist to reassure audiences we want to reach for personal and professional reasons Since methods are so important for scientific study, this essay is to compare qualitative research and quantitative research and find out suitable method(s) for my research. In part I, the definition of each method are given, together with the distinctions between these two methods. The distinctions are listed from the following aspects: the ideological difference, different requirements for contact in quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher, different preoccupations of quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher, the objectivity of quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher, data collection and analysis in quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher, the main steps in quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher, and advantages and disadvantages of quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher. In part II, the method that I will choose for my further study is mentioned as well as the reasons and limitations. In the end comes the conclusion. Part I I. Definition and ideological difference of quantitative research and qualitative research Quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation observable phenomena via statistic, mathematical, or computational techniques. (Given, Lisa M. 2008) Qualitative research is a scientific method of observation to gather non-numerical data. ( Babbie, Earl 2014) It is hard to know what the two methods are really is according to such definition. By distinction of them, the understanding would be much clear. A distinction is commonly drawn between quantitative and qualitative research among social scientists. There is historical disciplinary origin in the distinction, especially social anthropology and sociology. In anthropology, although quantitative method has lately been more adopted, qualitative data is the primary mode and is relied on for a long time. In sociology, since World War II, lots of disciplinary trends have fostered questionnaires and other survey methods for collecting data. ‘Qualitative methods’ has been used widely, also, to refer to the work of researcher who works as differently as ethnographers, clinical and organizational psychologists, grounded-theorist sociologists, or macrohistorians/sociologists. Qualitative researchers tend to lay considerable emphasis on situational and often structural contexts, in contrast to many quantitative researchers, whose work is multivariate but often weak on context. Qualitative researchers tend, however, to be weak on cross-comparisons because they often study only single situations, organizations, and institutions. For decades, quantitative research has been regarded as the orthodoxy and qualitative researchers the troublesome but largely irrelevant sect. Qualitative researchers have tended to struggle under the shadow of this dominant orthodoxy and have had to be content with much lower levels of funding for their research. These debates have been conducted in terms of various contrasts in purpose and style and have produced a slate of pejorative terms used to defend preferred methods, and to abuse other methods. The following table based on Halfpenny (1979), provides some examples of such contrasting labels. Contrasting qualitative and quantitative labels Qualitative Quantitative relativistic holistic inductive ideographic descriptive/exploratory speculative/illustrative grounded subjective exposes actors’ meanings flexible/fluid case-study political non-rigorous soft dry good bad story-telling feminine universalistic atomistic deductive nomothetic explanatory hypothesis-testing abstract objective imposes theory fixed survey value-free rigorous hard wet bad good number-crunching masculine It hard to tell which one is superior to the other one from the table, and I will compare the two methods from the following aspects. II. Different requirements for contact in quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher According to Norman(2000), when quantitative methods are used, there is few requirement for the contact between the researcher and the people being studied. The process requires no verbal contact and the data collected are always secondary. When there is contact, such as in structured interviewing, the duration is limited. However, if the researcher has an assistant, such work can be done by the assistant, so researcher could avoid direct contact with the people being studied. “This maintenance of distance from the people being studied, and the fanatical resistance to any form of personal disclosure or emotional involvement by the researcher, is largely practiced in the belief that it will ensure that objectivity is achieved.” (Norman 2000) On the other hand, in qualitative method, the contact between researcher and people being studied is inevitable. For example, participant observation requires the researcher fully involved in the social actors’ world, so that researcher can be an ‘insider’ and able to feel the culture and worldviews of the social actors. The contact in in-depth, unstructured interviewing involves varying degrees. The degree would be higher when the in-depth interview is carried on the same person. III. Different preoccupations of quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher According to Bryman (1993), researchers who use quantitative method has the following preoccupations. Firstly, they have a primary concern with concepts and their measurement. The problem is deciding what to measure, and how to measure it. Part of the process of measuring a concept is to establish whether the procedure is reliable and valid. The second concern is the establishment of causality. It is generally accepted that three conditions have to be met in order to establish causation. First, it has to be demonstrated that there is a relationship between two or more variables. Second, this relationship is not the result of presence of a third variable that produces changes in the two variables. Third, there is a temporal order between the variable such that one has the possibility of causing the other. Generalization is the third concern among quantitative researchers. There is a desire to make descriptive statements, and universal theoretical propositions. In other words, they want to make sure that their result can be used beyond the population being studied. The forth concern is the possibility to replicate the findings in other project. And the last concern is the tendency to focus on individuals. Quantitative researchers should realize that they are likely to be working with a demographic rather than a social reality. According to Bryman (1988), the preoccupations of researchers involved in qualitative research are as follows. Firstly, they use the social actors’ point of view. In this kind of research, the people being studied is ‘insiders’, while in quantitative research is ‘outsiders’. And qualitative researchers searcher for multiple realities, compared with quantitative researchers for single reality. The second concern is the importance to produce detailed descriptions of social settings being investigated. Thirdly, qualitative researchers view the social word as processual rather than static. They believe that as participants in the social process, the relationship is dynamic. Fourthly, a more flexible approach is adopted by qualitative researchers, because it is unlikely for researchers to have an adequate grasp of situation. The final preoccupation of qualitative researchers is that they would like to develop concepts and theory in their research. They believe that adopting a theory in advance will not only put limits on the research but will also prevent them from taking the participants’ point of view. IV. The objectivity of quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher Quantitative research is considered to be objective, while qualitative research is considered to be subjective. Norman believe, it is misleading, because so-called ’objectivity’ is achieved through corroboration, replication and consensus, not by the selection of particular research methods. And that corroboration and replication are easier to achieve with quantitative rather than qualitative methods, since in qualitative research, the researcher is usually the measuring instrument and no two instrument are the same.(Norman 2000) Then how does each of them show their objectivity of their research? They have different methods to do so. Quantitative researchers focused on establishing the ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ of their measurements that their instruments measure what they claim to measure and that they do so consistently. They establish validity and reliability on methods involving corroboration and replication. Qualitative researchers are rather divided on the need to establish the authenticity of their findings. Since corroboration and replication are hard to make for qualitative data, researchers claim that, they if they have acted professionally, and have explained how they went about their research, their accounts should be trusted. Other qualitative researchers have argued that the social actors concerned must corroborate any account that a researcher gives of social life. In other words, the research’s account must correspond closely to social actors’ accounts. (Norman 2000) V. Data collection and analysis in quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher According to Zoltan Doenyei, in quantitative research, the data we collected are mainly numerical data which are supposed to be analyzed with statistical methods. As in a survey, questionnaire is used, and the data would be analyzed by SPSS, software to work with statistics. However, data in qualitative research is wordy data which can’t be analyzed with statistic methods. For example: in an interview, we transcribe the recording in to written-down form and all these materials can only be analyzed by content analysis. According to Halfpenny (1996), in spite of the surface differences between words and numbers, quantitative and qualitative data are not fundamentally different. Quantitative data is usually produced by coding some other data, which is reduced to a number by stripping off context and removing content from it. Later, after manipulating the numbers, they are interpreted, that is, expanded by adding content and context which enable one to see through the numerical tokens back to the social word. (Halfpenny 1996:5) Wordy data collected in quantitative research will be transformed in to numbers through coding. Similarly, some non-numerical data from qualitative research may be summarized in form of tables. In recent years, British sociology has experienced a wholesale disposal of counting, along with the positivistic bath water. In response, Silverman (1985,1993) has argued that ‘simple counting techniques can offer a means to survey the whole corpus of data ordinarily lost in intensive, qualitative research’ (Silverman 1985:140). Such counting in qualitative research can provide some support for the representativeness of certain features within a social group or category. However, Silverman went on to argue that it is important to count the countable, preferably by using the categories of the social actors rather than those of the researcher. (Halfpenny 1996) Since the main distinction of quantitative research and qualitative research lies in the part of data, the table of Norman is given to show the distinction in a clearer way. Data collection techniques Data analysis techniques Quantitative Observation: structured Questionnaire (self-administered) Structured interview Content analysis of documents Qualitative Participant observation Observation: semi-structured and unstructured Focused interview In-depth interview Oral/life histories Focused groups/group interviews Content analysis of documents Quantitative Description Distribution: numerical and graphical Central tendency and dispersion Association Correlation: simple, partial and multiple Analysis of variance and covariance Regression: simple, partial and multiple Causation Factor analysis Path analysis Regression: simple, partial and multiple Inference Sample statistic to population parameter Sample differences to population differences Qualitative Description Theory generation Analytic induction Grounded theory: open and axial coding Categorizing and connecting From everyday typifications to typologies VI. The main steps in quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher The first step of quantitative research is to deduce a hypothesis from the theory. The specification of hypotheses to be tested is particularly like to be found in experimental research. On other research designs sometimes entail the testing of hypotheses. The next step is to design the research which may include external validity of findings and researchers’ ability to impute causality to their findings. Step 3 is to devise measures of concepts. We may also call it operationalization, which means operations by which a concept is measured (Bridgman 1927). The step 4 is to choose research site(s) together with research subjects and respondents. Then research instruments should be administered. For example, observing the setting and the behavior of people and assigning categories to each element of the behavior. Step 6 is to transform all the information collected in the research to data, and sometimes we call the process ‘coding the information’. Step 7 is to analysis the data. In this step a number of techniques would be used to reduce the amount of collected data, to test for relationships between variables, to develop ways of presenting the results of the analysis to others, and so on. After analyzing the data, findings or results would emerge. So the last step is to write up the findings and results and get a conclusion. In this procedure, it is not enough to relay what has been found, what researchers should do is to make your results shown in a more convincing way. Different from quantitative research, the first step in qualitative research is to general your research questions. You may have a series of concerns in your search. So in the starting point, what you should do is to general them. Step 2 is to select relevant sites and subjects which is almost the same with quantitative research. Step 3 is to collect relevant data and then interpret the data. Step 4 is to do conceptual and theoretical work. Unlike quantitative research, findings and results in qualitative research may not directly be worked out after data analysis, so researchers are required to do some research on some concepts and theories to make the data worthy and meaningful. In this step, coupled with the interpretation of data, that forms the study’s findings. If the findings can be formed, the next step is to do tighter specification of research questions. However, if the data is not sufficient to bring out findings, what researchers should follow is to collect further data. The final step is to write up findings and form conclusions. And the same as in quantitative research, readers has to be convinced about the credibility and significance of interpretations offered. Researchers cannot simply show the words they hear and the things they see. The salience of what researchers have seen and heard has to be impressed on audience. VII. Advantages and disadvantages of quantitative researcher and qualitative researcher In this part, I selected the following tables to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the two research methods. Except for some of the contents that have been discussed in the previous parts, goals and examples of the two research methods are listed. Furthermore, critiques are mentioned in the final part. Comparison of Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods of Inquiry (Anne Sigismund Huff 2009) Qualitative Quantitative Typical goals • Explanation (how or why things happen) • Detail (adding detail and depth to abstract theoretic explanation) • Empathy or interpretation (connecting abstract ideas to human experience). • Exploration (seeking unacknowledged antecedents, • unanticipated consequences) • Inference(from sample to population) • Prediction (past to future) • Description (pattern in large data sets • Hypothesis • Testing (increasing confidence in a theoretic explanation) • Generalization (expanding the range of a theoretic explanation) Examples • Observation(participant, nonparticipant; overt, covert) • Historical research • Cultural studies • Content analysis • Focus groups • Unstructured and semistructured interviews • Case studies • Life histories • Ethnographies • Biographies/autobiographies • Phenomenology • Grounded studies • Document analysis • Coding visual data • Dramaturgy • Artistic responses • Statistical analysis (parametric, nonparametric) • Regression (linear, nonlinear) • Principal component and factor analysis • Analysis of variance (ANOVA, MANOVA) • Structural equation modeling • Game theory • Simulation • Forecasting (time series analysis) • Optimal control theory • Trend analysis Ideals • Rich description • Meaning • Qualified arguments • Context-specific descriptions • Reflection • Connection • Objectivity • Neutrality • Replicable procedures • Discovery of causal laws • Abstraction • Precision • Rigor • Verifiability Critique • Subjectivity • Sloppy observations masquerading as interpretation • Intrusion of the researcher in all representations • Oversimplification • Unacknowledged subjectivity of definitions and procedures Part II My choice Since research methods are so important to the research, to select an appropriate method is essential to the success of the research. In this part, I will analyze my choice based on the previous part of this essay. My future thesis may focus on the approaches for teachers to improve students’ critical thinking in their English intensive reading class. At the very beginning of my research, instead of finding out the possible problems by a questionnaire, I would like to take an unstructured observation before that. So that I can be an insider and get the first hand information. I will adopt qualitative research here. After the permission from both teachers and students, I will go to their English intensive reading classes for one semester, to jot down some phenomena in the class that reflect the problems. Then, I will work out the probable barriers that prevent student from critical thinking based on my observation record. And in the following part, I will design a self-completion questionnaire for the students to work out the real problems in their critical thinking which is a quantitative method. The reason why I choose questionnaire is that it is easy to get large data in a short time, and it can make a distance between me and the students which would make students free safe and honest to answer the questions. The questions on the questionnaire are all based on my observation and later summarization from my note. With the questionnaire there would be a covering letter explaining the purpose of my questionnaire stressing the need for cooperation and the anonymity. Factor analysis would be done for the data from the questionnaire. I would describe the answers I get from the questionnaire and associate them with the class observation to find out causation and inference the main problems that prevent students’ critical thinking. To deal with the problems, I would search for materials and references to work out strategies. This would take me lots of time, however it is the most essential part of my study. Through lots of reading and thinking, I would design a set of approaches for teachers to try in their English intensive reading class for stimulating students’ critical thinking. After that, I would design a case study as a qualitative research again. The case study contains two parts: observation and surveys. I choose case study because it provides an opportunity for my research problem to be studied in some depth, and will last for a relevant longer time. Then I will train the teachers for the experimental group to make them clear about my purpose, procedure, key points of my approaches. When the teachers gave classes to the students, I will observe in the classroom again to video the class and take notes for the behavior of the students and teachers. To carry a ‘field research’ (Buegess 1984) , I would like to be the participant observer that means I myself would be one of the teachers in the experimental group. In this way, I can operate my approaches in the way it designed and get full feedback of them. The result of my observation would be described to the reader. In my survey, all respondents will be asked the same questions. Information would be gathered by means of self-completion surveys, by online surveys and face-to-face interviews. The aim is to acquire answers from as many as people, so that I can make comparison and demonstrate that certain features exist in certain categories. Question words would be picked carefully to make sure that all questions mean the same to all respondents. What, where, when and how questions would be put in self-completion survey, a small test would be carried on line. Why question would be asked in face-to-face interviews. Respondents would be asked to finish an online test to evaluate their critical thinking level. For the interview, I would prefer the focused interviews. In these interviews, I have an aim (to see why they have or don’t have intention to think in their English intensive reading class ) in mind when I conduct the interviews, but the respondents is more free to talk about the topic. Interviews are social encounters. We can see it only as a way to gain the information we want. We should follow the rules it. For example, the interviewees not only know the information that is required, but also understand what is expected of them. Without this, the interviewees may feel uncomfortable and this affects the resultant data.(Tim May 1997) And in order to make my interview attractive, I will prepare small gifts for interviewees. A focused interview is a process of building up trust and cooperation. So I will design not only descriptive questions, but also structural questions (Spradley 1979). These enable my interviewer to explore areas of students’ life and experiences in greater depth; they can also be used to explore and disconfirm particular ideas I have. Combine data from both observation and survey, I will use some skill from the grounded theory. First, I will find the effective approaches that can really stimulate students’ critical thinking in their English intensive class. On the other hand, I will remove some ineffective ones from the list of approaches. To saturate my design, I will ask more teachers out of the research for advice, and try to work out more to-be tested approaches, and do the test again and again. The design would be improved after each trail. When I feel satisfied with my design, I will go on to think about further instances, for example, can these approaches be effective for other subjects? There would be no stop in finding new approaches because the circumstance is dynamic. The society keeps changing and students’ thinking ways are changing and classroom teaching media is changing too. The final thesis is only a stage for a rest, but not a full stop in searching. Looking back on my design, there would be some limitations. First, in the case study, the number of participants are designed not as many as quantitative research, so it is lack of validity and reliability to use the result to prove the efficiency of my approaches for the whole range of students. Second, it is hard for me to do replication research, so there would be criticism about the study of a single population. Those are remaining to be reconsidered for my research. Conclusion Both quantitative and qualitative research methods have their unique features, and suitable for unique areas. What we should do is to select appropriate methods for our search. Neither of them is perfect, and sometimes we should combine them together and make full use of their advantages to make service for our research. References Strauss, Anselm L. (1987). Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientist. Cambridge University Press. Anne Sigismund Huff. (2009). Design Research for Publication. Sage Publications,Inc. Alan Bryman.(2004). Social Research Methods Second Edition. Oxford University Press. Babbie, Earl (2014). The Basics of Social Research (6th ed.).Belmont, California : Wadsworth Cengage. David Nachmias, Chava Nachmias. (1976). Research Methods in the Social Science. Edward Arnold(Publishers)Ltd. Given, Lisa M. (2008). The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications. Judith Bell, Stephen Waters. (2018). Doing Your Research Project: A Guide for First-time Researchers.7th Edition. Open University Press. Martyn Hammersley. (2013). The Myth of Research-based Policy& Practice. SAGE Publications Inc. Norman Blaikie. (2000). Designing Social Research. Blackwell Publishers Inc. Tim May. (1997). Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process. Second Edition. Open University Press.