In early August, our Gateway PhD students will come to San Jose for a one-week residency, and I was asked to give a talk to them about choosing proper research methods for their studies. To prepare for this talk, I will be sorting out my thoughts on this blog, and hopefully I will find the best way to cover this complex topic in the thirty minutes I’m given.
We all know that there are two types of research – quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research seeks to describe observations of a phenomenon in quantitative measures, and results of quantitative research are usually numerical represented. Qualitative research, on the other hand, defies quantification and it captures the nuanced details of a phenomenon that cannot be observed by quantitative methods. Which type of research to pursue has everything to do with the nature of one’s research topic and research problem.
For example, we are studying people’s attitudes toward a new library policy, and we may approach it quantitatively. We may administer a survey among library patrons. On the survey, there are five statements representing different attitudes toward the policy, and patrons are asked to select the one they most agree with. Findings of the study can be described via measures like frequency distribution, mode, or even correlational measures (e.g. the relationship between demographic variables and the statement choice). For the same topic, we may also approach it qualitatively. Instead of using the survey instrument, we gather patrons in the library conference room to conduct focus group interviews. This means of inquiry will give us an in-depth view of their attitudes toward the policy, which will be a much fuller view than what the five statements can cover.
Now we are at a dilemma – which type of research should we engage in? Well, we need to go back to our original problem – people’s attitude toward the new library policy. How do we operationally define the variable “attitude toward the policy”? We may ask questions like – has there been any research about the new policy? Do we know enough about this policy to generate an exhaustive list of attributes for the variable (e.g. a list of statements to describe every possible attitude)? Is it our goal to find out how many people have what attitudes, or do we just want to understand how exactly patrons respond to this policy?
As you can see, these questions are helping us decide whether we want to pursue this topic deductively or inductively. The deductive approach allows us to go from general to specific – that is, we have a general theory, and we want to test it out in specific cases. The inductive approach is the other way around – we go from specific to general, and we make observations of specific cases and draw conclusions from that. So, if our answers to the above questions are – yes we do know enough to general an exhaustive list of attributes for the variable “attitude” and we do want to find out how many library patrons have what kinds of attitudes, it means we are approaching the topic deductively and should engage in quantitative research. On the other hand, we may approach the topic inductively and pursue qualitative research to find out what exactly are people’s attitudes toward the library policy.
(to be continued)
Formalized Curiosity 