Quantitative Research – Its characteristics and advantages!
What is Quantitative Research?
Quantitative Research is a research methodology in which quantifiable data or quantitative data is collected and analyzed. In simple understanding, this type of research includes data that can be expressed in numeric terms and can be analyzed using various mathematical and statistical methods and formulas.
There are many ways in which one can conduct quantitative research like conducting online surveys, online polls, sharing surveys, and many more. Once the data is collected, it is analyzed and inferred using mathematical and statistical methods and ways. Once the data is analyzed, you can go ahead with making the required changes or can choose to dig deeper into the research. There are many areas in which this type of research is used. For instance, it is extensively famous in the field of marketing, economics, and many other fields of social science.
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Characteristics of Quantitative Research
With so much research work going all around the place, sometimes it becomes tricky to identify the type of research. But quantitative research can be easily distinguished from the rest because of certain distinctive characteristics. Let’s look at these characteristics and get a clear understanding of what quantitative research looks like.
- One of the characteristics to distinguish quantitative research is to look at the process of data collection. If the process is in a structured way with proper questionnaires, surveys or polls then the research might be quantitative in nature, if it matches the other following characteristics.
- The type of questions that are asked in quantitative data collection include concrete close-ended questions.
- As there are many factors affecting the subjects associated with research and therefore prior research is done to choose variables that have to be included in the research before floating the questionnaire and collecting data from the respondents.
- This type of research will always be supported by quantified data with a presentation in either numeric or graphic form.
Quantitative Research Examples
Let’s look at some of the examples where quantitative research can be of use and get a better understanding of it.
- A company or brand may wish to know its performance in the market and for that, it may want to conduct a customer satisfaction survey in which it can record the level of customer satisfaction on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10. This will come under quantitative research as the data points are in numeric form and multiple mathematical and statistical calculations can be done on the data set.
- Performance of a sale event can also come under this type of research based on the data we track. We can look at the sale of products and the number of people participating in the event and run multiple mathematical and statistical functions on the data set and figure out the success of the event.
Advantages of Quantitative Research
Quantitative research includes numeric data in support of the research argument. And we all know that a lot can be done when numbers are involved. There are many benefits or advantages of quantitative research. Let’s look and understand the benefits that this type of research can provide-
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- This type of research is represented using quantitative data which is reliable in nature and gives an accurate picture of the goal at hand. This is the reason that researchers prefer turning towards quantitative research in a situation of conflict.
- The numeric nature of this type of research gives a wider scope for data collection from the target audience.
- The data collected in this type of research is on a numeric scale of 1-5 or 1-10 which removes the risk of any kind of bias on the respondent’s end. This makes quantitative research a non-bias perspective.
- This type of research is less time-consuming from both researchers as well as respondents’ points of view. This is so because asking respondents’ views is in a numeric form which does not take time and analyzing those numbers is also easy with all new tools and technologies.
- This type of research involves a straightforward way of data collection which makes it comparatively less costly and complicated.
Disadvantages of Quantitative Research
With all the characteristics and advantages, quantitative research can seem to be a very attractive research to conduct. It is but one should also be aware of certain limitations quantitative research brings with it before starting your research work. The limitations are as follows-
- The setting up of survey instruments and the after-analysis of collected data is done manually which makes it vulnerable as a slight mistake in selecting the correct sampling technique or any statistical error in data analysis will give us completely wrong results for the research.
- As the nature of this type of research is highly statistical, therefore, a researcher from a non-numeric or statistical background will find it extremely difficult and complicated to do an extensive mathematical analysis of data.
- The data points collected for quantitative research are derived from close-ended questions which limit the outcome that can be analyzed for a particular data set. Also, the range in which a respondent gets to answer restricts his point of view to a small extent.
Conclusion
Quantitative research is numeric research where data points are collected from the target audience in numeric values. The end result of such research is derived from running multiple statistical, mathematical, and computation tools and tricks. The result generated from such research is concrete in nature and gives an unbiased and logical analysis if no manual mistake is made in finalizing the sampling technique and choosing compounding methods.
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FAQs
How do you know if a study is qualitative or quantitative?
If a study contains numeric data for its analysis then it will be coined under quantitative research while on the other hand, qualitative data accounts for words, feelings, and emotions and does not account for any numeric data or analysis.
What is the best topic for quantitative research?
For any comparison, quantitative research outperforms qualitative research.
What is the main purpose of quantitative research?
This type of research is majorly done to generate more knowledge around different topics. This also gives us a greater understanding of the social world and its order.
