What is the importance of research design in qualitative and quantitative research?

Qualitative and quantitative market research approaches are designed to give you very different perspectives, even if you are using them with the same audience. Qualitative research gives you rich, detailed, and often emotionally driven insights based on the personal views of those you interview – for example, what do people feel about your product? In contrast, quantitative surveys give you a broader, full view, based on hard statistics – i.e. what % of people like or dislike your product?

Advantages of using both qualitative and quantitative research methods

Given that both qualitative and quantitative market research provides vital ingredients of the understanding you are looking for (the Why and the What), combining them should deliver significant benefits, enabling you to compare and contrast results and gain much deeper insights.

However, traditionally this hasn’t been achievable due to deeply rooted industry perceptions of the different purposes of each methodology. Firstly, qualitative and quantitative methods are often seen as providing opposing viewpoints, with the former a more open style, based on the power of human interaction, and the latter more closed and metrics-driven. This meant they were seen as requiring different skill sets and to meet different needs, leading to specialism in one or the other. This, in turn, meant gaining a combined and universal view proved to be complex and costly.

Thanks to recent advances in market research technology, in many cases these challenges can now be overcome. Here are five ways that using qualitative and quantitative research together delivers real benefits:

1. The power of online research

Previously all qualitative research had to be carried out face-to-face through focus groups. The growth of digital channels provides new and more accessible ways of gauging qualitative insights, such as through online communities or online focus groups where you can share and show information, stimulus, and materials with your audience. Well-designed online communities allow you to collect quantitative data through quick polls and surveys, from the same audience, in a unified way.

2. How to gain a holistic picture

Bringing qualitative and quantitative market research together through one, unified online platform enables you to gain a holistic picture. It means you can have a multi-stage discussion where you can validate a hypothesis, gain an understanding of it (through qualitative research) then widen your scope to get statistical data (quantitative), before testing a solution through further qualitative exploration. This creates a virtuous circle – all in the same system, and with the same audience.

3. The benefits of combining the Why and the What

You don’t need to run a multi-stage process to gain value from combining qualitative and quantitative market research. You can simply use the two methodologies together to gain deeper insight into particular questions. For example, recent research found that 83% of e-commerce shoppers add products to their online carts, but don’t then finalize the transaction, costing businesses millions in lost revenue. Rather than merely quantifying the challenge, retailers could add a qualitative dimension to find out the precise reasons as to why a shopper didn’t buy, giving a much richer, and more directly actionable, insight into consumer behavior.

4. How automation drives agility

Previously a large part of the complexity of bringing qualitative and quantitative research together was that they used different systems to collect, analyze and report results. Put very simply, budgets didn’t stretch to both so you had to choose. Technology can now provide a single platform that handles both, lowering time to results through automation and reducing cost, complexity, and resources. Qualitative research was previously very time-consuming and labor-intensive – online qualitative projects are considerably faster.

5. Connect more deeply with your audience

At a time of growing competition, brands realize that they need to build strong connections to their customers if they are to retain their loyalty. This means creating a deeper understanding based on empathy, and combining qualitative and quantitative market research enables you to build a more human, emotional connection to your audience, but also take direct action to address their needs.

When is qualitative or quantitative research used?

In the past combining qualitative and quantitative market research approaches was both difficult and costly. And while there are still some areas where face-to-face qualitative research is the only answer, more and more business challenges can benefit from bringing the two methodologies together through online platforms that deliver the What and the Why together in one place. Through this, you can uncover the full story, provide deeper insights, build a narrative around customer needs, ultimately driving better, more informed decision making.

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Qualitative research studies can provide you with details about human behavior, emotion, and personality characteristics that quantitative studies cannot match.

Data from qualitative studies describes the qualities or characteristics of something. You cannot easily reduce these descriptions to numbers—as you can the findings from quantitative research; though you can achieve this through an encoding process. Qualitative research studies can provide you with details about human behavior, emotion, and personality characteristics that quantitative studies cannot match. Qualitative data includes information about user behaviors, needs, desires, routines, use cases, and a variety of other information that is essential in designing a product that will actually fit into a user’s life.

While quantitative research requires the standardization of data collection to allow statistical comparison, qualitative research requires flexibility, allowing you to respond to user data as it emerges during a session. Thus, qualitative research usually takes the form of either some form of naturalistic observation such as ethnography or structured interviews. In this case, a researcher must observe and document behaviors, opinions, patterns, needs, pain points, and other types of information without yet fully understanding what data will be meaningful.

Following data collection, rather than performing a statistical analysis, researchers look for trends in the data. When it comes to identifying trends, researchers look for statements that are identical across different research participants. The rule of thumb is that hearing a statement from just one participant is an anecdote; from two, a coincidence; and hearing it from three makes it a trend. The trends that you identify can then guide product development, business decisions, and marketing strategies.

Because you cannot subject these trends to statistical analysis, you cannot validate trends by calculating a p-value or an effect size—as you could validate quantitative data—so you must employ them with care. Plus, you should continually verify such data through an ongoing qualitative research program.

With enough time and budget, you can engage in an activity called behavioral coding, which involves assigning numeric identifiers to qualitative behavior, thus transforming them into quantitative data that you can then subject to statistical analysis. In addition to the analyses we described earlier, behavioral coding lets you perform a variety of additional analyses such as lag sequential analysis, a statistical test that identifies sequences of behavior—for example, those for Web site navigation or task workflows.?However, applying behavioral coding to your observations is extremely time consuming and expensive. Plus, typically, only very highly trained researchers are qualified to encode behavior. Thus, this approach tends to be cost prohibitive.

Additionally, because it is not possible to automate qualitative-data collection as effectively as you can automate quantitative-data collection, it is usually extremely time consuming and expensive to gather large amounts of data, as would be typical for quantitative research studies. Therefore, it is usual to perform qualitative research with only 6 to 12 participants, while for quantitative research, it’s common for there to be hundreds or even thousands of participants. As a result, qualitative research tends to have less statistical power than quantitative research when it comes to discovering and verifying trends.

Using Quantitative and Qualitative Research Together

While quantitative and qualitative research approaches each have their strengths and weaknesses, they can be extremely effective in combination with one another.

While quantitative and qualitative research approaches each have their strengths and weaknesses, they can be extremely effective in combination with one another. You can use qualitative research to identify the factors that affect the areas under investigation, then use that information to devise quantitative research that assesses how these factors would affect user preferences. To continue our earlier example regarding display preferences: if qualitative research had identified display type—such as TV, computer monitor, or mobile phone display—the researchers could have used that information to construct quantitative research that would let them determine how these variables might affect user preferences. At the same time, you can build trends that you’ve identified through quantitative research into qualitative data-collection methods and, thus verify the trends.

While this might sound contrary to what we’ve described above, the approach is actually quite straightforward. An example of a qualitative trend might be that younger users prefer autostereoscopic displays only on mobile devices, while older users prefer traditional displays on all devices. You may have discovered this by asking an open-ended, qualitative question along these lines: “What do you think of 3D displays?” This question would have opened up a discussion about 3D displays that uncovered a difference between stereoscopic displays, autostereoscopic displays, and traditional displays. In a subsequent quantitative study, you could address these factors through a series of questions such as: “Rate your level of preference for a traditional 3D display—which requires your using 3D glasses—on a mobile device,” with options ranging from strongly prefer to strongly dislike. An automated system assigns a numeric value to whatever option a participant chooses, allowing a researcher to quickly gather and analyze large amounts of data.

Conclusion

When setting out to perform user research, … it is important to understand the different applications of these two approaches to research.

When setting out to perform user research—whether performing the research yourself or assigning it to an employee or a consultant—it is important to understand the different applications of these two approaches to research. This understanding can help you to choose the appropriate research approach yourself, understand why a researcher has chosen a particular approach, or communicate with researchers or stakeholders about a research approach and your overarching research strategy. The examples we’ve provided here provide just a small sampling of the many ways in which can analyze and employ qualitative and quantitative data. In what other ways do you use and combine qualitative and quantitative research?