Main Difference
The main difference between Quantitative Research and Qualitative Research is that the Quantitative Research is a all procedures for the numerical representation of empirical facts and Qualitative Research is a scientific method of observation to gather non-numerical data
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Quantitative Research
In natural and social sciences, and maybe in other fields, quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques. The objective of quantitative research is to develop and employ mathematical models, theories, and hypotheses pertaining to phenomena. The process of measurement is central to quantitative research because it provides the fundamental connection between empirical observation and mathematical expression of quantitative relationships.
Quantitative data is any data that is in numerical form such as statistics, percentages, etc. The researcher analyses the data with the help of statistics and hopes the numbers will yield an unbiased result that can be generalized to some larger population. Qualitative research, on the other hand, inquires deeply into specific experiences, with the intention of describing and exploring meaning through text, narrative, or visual-based data, by developing themes exclusive to that set of participants.Quantitative research is widely used in psychology, economics, demography, sociology, marketing, community health, health & human development, gender studies, and political science; and less frequently in anthropology and history. Research in mathematical sciences, such as physics, is also “quantitative” by definition, though this use of the term differs in context. In the social sciences, the term relates to empirical methods originating in both philosophical positivism and the history of statistics, in contrast with qualitative research methods.
Qualitative research produces information only on the particular cases studied, and any more general conclusions are only hypotheses. Quantitative methods can be used to verify which of such hypotheses are true. A comprehensive analysis of 1274 articles published in the top two American sociology journals between 1935 and 2005 found that roughly two thirds of these articles used quantitative method.
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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.