Research Methods Analysis

The debate on quantitative and qualitative approaches has begun in the 1960’s, when the social sciences began to have doubts as to whether quantitative approaches, adopted from the natural sciences, could provide critical perspectives on what is happening in society, or solutions to the problems they wished to solve. In the 70’s, the educational research community began to engage in a similar debate. This polemic debate included the question whether quantitative and qualitative research approaches could be combined (Schulze, 2003).

A review of the literature reveals various distinctions between the paradigms underlying quantitative and qualitative approaches. Generally, authors identify positivism as the paradigm underpinning quantitative research. However, the paradigms that form the basis for qualitative research are classified differently by various scholars. In one example, Cohen and Manion (1996) distinguish between positivism and anti-positivism. Anti-positivism, which underlies qualitative research, includes phenomenology, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism (Schulze, 2003).

In another approach, Hathaway (1995, in Schulze, 2003) uses the term empirical-analytical to describe that paradigm structuring quantitative research and interpretive for the paradigm underlying qualitative research. The empirical-analytical paradigm is associated with positivism, while the interpretive model has a wide range of descriptors, including phenomenological, hermeneutical, experiential, naturalistic or inductive (Schulze, 2003). Although there is a slight variation in assumptions, all the traditions in one paradigm generally share common assumptions about methodology, ontology and epistemology. For example, the researcher’s role is different in two paradigms: either researcher as a detached outsider in empirical-analytical research, or the researcher as is part of the phenomenon of study in interpretive research.

Quantitative research is suited to theory testing and developing universal statements. It provides a “general” picture of a situation. Quantitative studies that produce results that is generalizable across contexts, although they neglect the reality of situations. On the other hand, qualitative inquiry provides the researcher with in-depth knowledge, although this is usually not generalizable. Qualitative research is more useful for exploring phenomena in specific contexts, articulating participant’s understandings and perceptions and generating tentative concepts and theories that directly pertain to particular environments (Schulze, 2003). Interpretive research may appear to be fraught with subjectivism and questionable precision, rigour or credibility. It has also been stated that although behaviour patterns may be the result of the meanings individuals attach to situations, these individuals may be falsely conscious-there may be an objective perspective which is different from that of the individuals themselves. We should therefore not restrict ourselves to the meanings attached to situations or phenomena by the participants themselves (Rex in Cohen and Manion, 1996, in Schulze, 2003).

While this interpretation is overly simplistic in that conscientious objective researchers will certainly "admit" to biases of which they are aware, the perspective on bias is different between the two. Subjective researchers shift the focus from eliminating researcher bias to developing the relationship with the respondent. Again, the difference is in the separation or integration of the researcher/subject. Nonetheless, qualitative researchers endeavor to achieve what Lincoln and Guba defined as credibility, transferability, dependability and conformability: the "trustworthiness of qualitative research." (Bradley, 1993)

Social sciences researchers' awareness toward subjectivity acknowledges the fact it cannot be eliminated. The difference between the two research traditions is that naturalistic researchers systematically acknowledge and document their biases rather than presumably strive to overcome them, as positivists do. (Mellon, 1990)