Academic research is a way for you to support or prove that your argument is right. It is also a strong support for your study.
For the research methods Quantitative research and Qualitative research, the major different between is the quantity and quality.
Quantitative research
Simply speaking, quantitative research is about a large group of survey to measure the study.
The strengths of quantitative research are that it can cover a large numbers of people’s view or opinion, it can cover different kinds of people and it contains a large group of data that can eliminate the variables.
As quantitative research is a kind of releasing a large numbers of surveys to the public, it can show up the public views and not just one or two people’s opinion. The research result can represent the social views as it contains many of the citizens in it. Besides, quantitative research can contains different kinds of citizens like different age, gender or living style. Different kinds of people can help the accuracy of the result. Final, this large group of people can help to eliminate the variables, like the different age with different gender’s result.
But for the weaknesses of quantitative research, too many audiences may reduce the reliable of the research result. As it is a random sampling survey, it may contain of repeating or reproducing of surveys. The precision of the result may not be real.
Qualitative research
Qualitative research is about the interview of a small group of people. It emphasizes the depth of the content of the research result.
The strengths of qualitative research are that it contains in-depth research result, the processes of the research are more detail and it is useful for some special case or study.
As qualitative research is research of a small group of people, you can get the information more deeply and in a more detail way, you can ask question by question and you can change the question according to the answer of the interviewer. Also, you can show out the whole process of the interview to let the people know the detail in it. Final, you can use this method on some special study, like some special people who got special experience.
For the weaknesses, it only contains of a small groups of people, it can’t represent the whole society. Also, it need more time to collect the information you need and it can’t show out the result of the variables of the audiences result.
In short, both research methods have it’s own strengths and weaknesses. To choose the better method, it needs to depend on your study topic, research area or the depth of the research result you want.
For my own research topic, I am quite interest in the topic of films in different places. As watching films is a part of my daily life and my interest, I think I will put more effort on this topic.
For the research method, I think I will use Quantitative research for my preliminary decision. As I think this topic no need to be in-depth but it needs more audience’s view to give out the result. Also, I think it also needs to see the influence of the variables, so I think Quantitative research is a better method for this topic.
Dear Harry, The writing demonstrates your understanding of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Their key criteria are mentioned. A point that you need to clarify is about the number of audiences in quantitative research. What do the large number of audiences (or respondents) reduce the reliability of the research? Where do you find this argument? Thanks for sharing your research interest here. For the coming blog, you can be more specific by stating the research question and the purpose of doing it.
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