Class 9

• The main goals of quantitative research are to measure data to understand or quantify social phenomena, concepts and their interrelations, and to establish causality.
• The main goals of qualitative research are to understand people's experiences and how they are defined and interpreted.
• Contrasts between Quantitative and Qualitative Research include the use of probability sampling in quantitative research and the use of a representative sample in qualitative research.
• Replication, or repeating a study using the same methods, provides a check for biases and routine errors in quantitative research.
• Interpret the data by determining the meanings that the research subject puts to activities that occur in the social environment.
• The main goals of qualitative research are to see through the eyes of the people being studied, emphasize on process, have flexibility and limited structure, and achieve a deep understanding of the people or groups being studied.
• Contrasts between quantitative and qualitative research include quantitative research falling within the positivist epistemological framework, while qualitative research is done by interpretive sociologists who reject positivist assumptions.
• Critiques of qualitative research include it being too subjective, prone to bias, unclear as to how a particular topic or theme became the focus of the research, difficult to replicate, and has a reactive effect that can be expected from subsequent researchers.
• Criticisms of quantitative research include the treatment of people and social institutions as if they are part of 'the world of nature', and the artificial and false sense of precision and accuracy produced by the measurement process.
• Criticisms of qualitative research include the disjuncture between research and everyday life due to the reliance on instruments and procedure.
• An analysis of relationships between variables in qualitative research ignores people's everyday experiences and how they are defined and interpreted.
• In qualitative research, the social world should be left as undisturbed as possible during the research process.
• Qualitative research tends to be interpretivist, concerned with finding out what an action or event means to the people involved.
• The ideals of quantitative research and how it is actually conducted may be very different, with less attention paid to matters of reliability and validity than what one might think.
• Quantitative researchers tend to assume an objectivist ontology, which assumes that a social reality exists that is independent of the observer, and that the social order is fixed.
• Valid quantitative findings may be achieved, but the conclusions don’t take into account what the people involved actually feel and think.
• Quantitative researchers counter that there may indeed be a social reality that may or may not be perceived.
• Qualitative research is often constructionist, social life is not seen as fixed, but as an outcome of interactions and negotiations, and it takes a naturalist perspective.
• Validity presupposes reliability, does reliability presupposes validity?
• Qualitative research is concerned primarily with words and images rather than numbers, is usually inductive, and the process starts with field research, then concepts and theories are developed.
• The main steps in qualitative research include collecting the data, determining which methods to use, and it may be more appropriate to use more than one method, such as ethnographic observations and interviews.
• The main goals of qualitative research include ethnography/participant observation, qualitative interviewing, focus groups, discourse and conversation analysis, and participatory action research.
• Some aspects of society are fixed or hard to change, according to quantitative researchers.
• Quantitative research may not understand the actual experiences of single motherhood.
• Explanations for findings may not address the perceptions of the people to whom the findings purportedly pertain.
• Ethnographic studies are more susceptible to subjective bias than either experimental or survey research studies.
• The natural science model of research should not be used to study society.
• • “The methods used in qualitative research are entirely dependent upon the researcher and, therefore, are much too idiosyncratic to be called methods.
• Validity presupposes reliability, does reliability presuppose validity?
• The crucial problem with quantitative research is its failure to adequately address the issue of meaning.
• Grounded theory is a term used to refer to a research approach that allows one to collect data without having any design.