Homework for my TA Week 8/9

Comments to be marked please.

Is it dishonest to remove outliers and/or transform data?

Qualitative research isn’t as scientific as quantitative methods

http://samanthakirby.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/ethics/#comment-39

Is it dishonest to remove outliers from your data?”

 

 

“Qualitative research isn’t as scientific as quantitative methods.”

Both qualitative and quantitative research are used in studies throughout many science disciplines. Qualitative research is focused more on human behaviour,  While Quantitative research uses a standard arrangement, with minor inter-disciplinary variances, of generating a hypothesis to be proved or disproved. This hypothesis must be provable by mathematical and statistical means, and is the basis around which the experiment is designed. Qualitative and quantitative research have several advantages and disadvantages, depending upon the researcher’s aim.

Advantages for Qualitative research

• It enables more intricate characteristics of a person’s experience to be studied
• Fewer restriction or assumptions are retained on the data that has been collected
• Not everything can be quantified, or quantified easily, and an advantage of qualitative research is that it can explore these things like individual experiences.
• Individuals can be studied in much more depth
• Because fewer assumptions are placed on the thing being studied it is great for exploratory research and hypothesis generation
• The participants are able to provide data in their own way

Disadvantages of Qualitative Research

• Qualitative data cannot be mathematically analysed in the same comprehensive way as quantitative results, so can only give a guide to general trends. It is a lot more open to personal opinion and judgment, and so can only ever give observations rather than results.
• It is not as time consuming as quantitative experiments, but qualitative research still requires a lot of careful thought and planning to ensure that the results obtained are still as accurate as possible.
• Any qualitative research design is typically unique and do lack the ability to be replicated.

Advantages of Quantitative Research

• Quantitative research allows the researcher to measure and analyse the data.
• The relationship between an independent and dependent variable can be studied in detail.
• This is beneficial because the researcher is more unbiased about the findings of the research.
• Quantitative research can be used to test hypotheses in experiments because of its ability to measure data using statistics.

Disadvantages of Quantitative Methods

• The focal disadvantage of quantitative research is the framework of the study or experiment is overlooked.
• Quantitative research does not study things in its natural setting or discuss the meaning things have for different people as qualitative research does.
• To get a statistically accurate result a large sample of the population must be studied.

To conclude, both Qualitative & Quantitative research have good & bad points in research, Qualitative research is ideal for individual people and small groups, while the Quantitative methods work better with a larger population.  I believe both are as scientific as the other, depending on what is being observed.  For researchers that are not statistically minded qualitative research would prove to be an easier way of recording data,  for this method the researcher looks for themes and describes the information in themes and patterns exclusive to that set of participants, rather than trawling through pages of data that has been spat out by a statistical program like SPSS.  I for one say yea to qualitative research!

Advantages & Disadvantages of Qualitative & Quantitative Research | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/info_8091178_advantages-disadvantages-qualitative-quantitative-research.html#ixzz1doJwaotU

http://www.experiment-resources.com/quantitative-research-design.html

http://generallythinking.com/answers/research-methods/what-are-the-advantages-of-qualitative-research/