"Qualitative Quantitative Focus • Quality of meaning and • Quantity, frequency and experience. magnitude • Participants’ points of view • Researcher’s point of view • Researcher is close • Researcher is distant Goals • Describe and explore in a • Predict, control, confirm or testnatural setting/environment in an artificial• Contextual understanding setting/environment. • Generalisation Design Flexible, evolving and emergent Structured, predetermined characteristic Sampling Small, purposive Large, random Data Researcher is the ‘living’ External instruments such ascollection instrument questionnaires Type of data Rich, deep data Hard, reliable numeric data Dr Nataliya Shiraz 2016/17 13Some similarities betweenqualitative and quantitative research • concerned with data reduction • concerned with answering research questions • concerned with relating data analysis to research literature • concerned with avoiding deliberate distortion • concerned with importance of transparency Dr Nataliya Shiraz 2016/17 14Criticism of qualitative research • too subjective– researcher decides what to focus on• difficult to replicate– unstructured format • problems of generalization– samples not ‘representative’ of all cases• lack of transparency– often unclear what researcher actually did Dr Nataliya Shiraz 2016/17 15? Focuses on a single phenomenon, concept or idea. What you need to do: ? State the goal using a verb, identify topic of interest, useneutral and non-directional language, define the sampleand setting ? Remember the question needs to be focused and feasible ? Addresses the “What” and “How” questions: “What are British university students’ experiencesin keeping a healthy lifestyle on campus?” “How do British university students react toeducation delivered on a mobile platform?” Dr Nataliya Shiraz 2016/17 16"