Quantitative vs. Qualitative research Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Quantitative vs. Qualitative research - Essay Example of the measures of concepts, then the research respondents are selected, the next step is issuing research instruments and data collection, what follows is data processing and analysis, after this process finding are drawn and conclusions made. The main steps involved in qualitative research are: setting the overall research questions, then selecting necessary subjects and sites, then relevant data ought to be collected, then interpretation follows, then theoretical and conceptual work follows, the last step is writing up conclusions and findings. In quantitative research, the quality issues involved are issues such as reliability, this deal with the measure of stability and consistency. Replication seeks to find out whether the study is repeatable. Validity seeks to establish whether what is measured is the one intended or if the conclusions are well founded. In qualitative research, quality issues are trustworthiness that entails credibility of the findings, transferability in terms of the applicability of the findings to other contexts; dependability is whether the findings apply at other times. Conformability is whether the investigator’s values have intruded to a high degree. Relevance is the importance of a topic in the field of study and the contribution made by the literature in that field. Quantitative research has major preoccupations such as measurement and reliability validity, causality which entails explanation on reason as to why things are the way they are and the direction taken by the causal influence, that is, dependent and independent variables. Another of these preoccupations is generalization which covers the question on the scope of the context, sample and population, as well as the extent to which the samples are representative. Replication is a value that seeks to reduce contamination of results by researcher values or biases, thorough procedure descriptions, and ability to duplicate in varying context. In qualitative research, the