Qualitative research

For people who check facts

The term qualitative research has at least three 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 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.