Transcription
Hello there everybody and welcome to the Mr. Sin channel. In this video, we're going to be going over qualitative and quantitative research. We're going to be talking about what both of these types of research are, how they're different, and also how they're similar.
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But this video is about qualitative and quantitative research. Now, they're both pretty similar, yet very different, and it's important to understand the differences between them. Qualitative research is going to be focusing on things that are up for discussion and for debate. It's going to be describing a lot of things. It will use surveys and observations and interviews, along with also looking at artifacts of an area. It'll look at language, it's going to look at religion and ethnicity. It's going to look at these things from a manner that is up for discussion.
Where quantitative is going to be trying to definitively prove something. If a geographer, for example, is looking at an area, it's going to look at the economic data, the political description. It's going to look at population breakdowns through age and gender, or even looking also at things that are just concrete. These are things that are facts. You can't dispute them. They're not up for debate.
When it comes actually to the research part, qualitative is going to be asking more questions that deal with what and how. They're going to be asking for more open-ended questions. For example, how do people living in an inner city view their country? Or how do AP students celebrate finishing the AP Human Geography test? These questions aren't necessarily going to have a hypothesis because we're not trying to predict anything here. We're trying to gauge and understand better the society around us.
Quantitative, on the other hand, is looking at research that is going to be looking at variables and it's trying to either prove a hypothesis or possibly even disprove it. Here, questions are going to be asked a little bit differently. Questions are going to be focused around what, how, and does. So, for example, how much? How often? What is the relationship between the two? What is the percentage? An example question could even be something as simple as, what is the religious breakdown of the United States? Or how often do farmers go to the market to sell produce if the road is paved or if it's unpaved? Or does public transportation actually solve transportation issues within a city? These are all things that would look at statistics and numbers to be able to answer these questions.
Where qualitative is more of an exploratory form of research and it's not necessarily defining and trying to prove or disprove a hypothesis. When it comes to collecting data, qualitative is normally going to use one source to collect data from. Maybe it's newspapers, journals. It might be observations or interviews, or even audio and video materials. Now, with qualitative, they can change things up throughout the study if I notice they're not getting enough responses from one area.
Quantitative, on the other hand, is just using numbers. They're looking for things to prove something right or wrong. So they're going to be looking for more statistics and things that are concrete.
Lastly, when it comes to analysis and also the final report, qualitative is going to be set into themes. See, researchers are going to take all the observations, all the information they collected, and try to break it down into different themes. This is very time-consuming, and the final report will have a lot of writing in it. It's going to have a lot of quotes and different things that they observed, and it will be up for discussion. The participants will be very involved in it.
Where quantitative, on the other hand, is not going to have that many words. It's going to be taking in the analysis portion all the different data points that they collected. Then they're going to break it down to see if there's any statistical significance behind any of the information they gathered. Then they will have a final conclusion that will either back up the hypothesis or go against it. The quantitative report is going to be a lot more rigid. It's not up for discussion or debate. It's just showing the findings of what they found. There's less interpretation there.
And that's it. This video was a really quick overview of qualitative and quantitative research, but hopefully, it helps you understand all the basics about these two different forms. Let me know in the comments below which one you think is more impactful, or when you think one form of research should be used over another, because they both have pros and cons to being used. Hopefully, you enjoyed the video. I'm Mr. Sin. Don't forget to subscribe and check out some of the other videos on the channel. And until next time, I'll see you online.