Qualitative research
The term qualitative research has at least four meanings:
- In the social sciences, qualitative research makes no attempt to measure, count, or classify, but rather tries to capture the full complexity of social phenomena through descriptive analyses that focus on the details and nuances of people's words and actions. Qualitative techniques were first developed in ethnography but are now used in most social sciences. In psychological and some other social sciences, when formal qualitative techniques became available in the 1990s, the decision to use them often reflected a philosophical or ideological belief that quantitative measures were inappropriate or inadequate in a human science (see qualitative psychological research). Nowadays, however, most social scientists would see qualitative and quantitative techniques as complementary (see multimethodology, each being appropriate to different phases of a research project.
- In statistics, qualitative analysis refers to procedures that use only dichotomous data – that is, data which can take only the values 0 (zero) and 1 (one). These techniques are suitable where events or entities can only be counted or classified rather than measured. The techniques themselves are, of course, numerically based.
- In chemistry, qualitative analysis refers to a lab technique used to determine the identities of multiple unknown chemicals via physical and chemical tests, e.g. their color, solubility in different solvents, precipitates formed (or not formed) when combined with certain ions, etc. For example, aqueous solutions of sodium nitrate and sodium chloride are both colorless. A simple method of determining which is which is to mix samples of each with samples of silver nitrate: mixing sodium nitrate and silver nitrate has no visible effect, but mixing sodium chloride and silver nitrate causes solid silver chloride to precipitate.
- In Climate research, qualitative reconstructions of past temperatures rely on records of events such as Frost fairs which indicate periods of cold or warmth, but give little or no numerical information as to the degree of temperature variation. Other indicators - dates of harvest, first flowering of plants - produce information somewhere between qualitative and quantitative.
See also: quantitative research
