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Qualitative Research
Qualitative research relies on unstructured and non-numerical data. The data include field notes written by the researcher during the course of his or her observation, interviews and questionnaires, focus groups, participant-observation, audio or video recordings carried out by the researcher in natural settings, documents of various kinds (publicly available or personal, paper-based or electronic records that are already available or elicited by the researcher), and even material artifacts. The use of these data is informed by various methodological or philosophical assumptions, as part of various methods, such as ethnography (of various kinds), discourse analysis (of various kinds), interpretative phenomenological analysis and other phenomenological methods. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, social work, and educational research.
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Quantitative (adjective)
Of a measurement based on some quantity or number rather than on some quality
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Quantitative (adjective)
Of a form of analysis that determines the amount of some element or compound in a sample