Qualitative research isn’t as scientific as quantitative methods.” week 9

In order to answer this question we need to think about what science is to us. According to Alport (1947) you can consider method as being scientific when it achieves prediction, understanding and control. Qualitative data analysis is when in-depth analysis of an individual can be carried out and involves case studies, interviews, focuse groups etc . On the other hand quantitative method is usually is described as numerical data collection which involves anything that can be observed and measured in some kind of form that involves numbers such as experiments that have operative variables that can be manipulated to see the outcome. By this simple definition of those two methods it seems that qualitative data achieves prediction, understanding and control. Therefore it can be argued that qualitative research is not that scientific as quantitative. Let me explain why.

Risberg and Hamburg (2003) referred qualitative researcher as not being that accurate and therefore he gave accreditation to quantitative methods as being more scientific. As I said before qualitative data analysis allows us to study individual behaviour, emotions and thoughts in depth by conducting for example interviews. Those interviews then can be interpreted, hovewer that interpretation will be based on subjective thoughts of the researcher. Cardwell et al. (1996) showed the use of interview by revising Reicher and Potter(1985) research on riot in the St Paul’s area of Bristol in 1980. Media at that time argued that the riots were behaving is really emotional way whereas unstructured interviews helped revealed the reason why. They found that people did that because in their belief they were defending area against the police, as the outcome they experienced strong feelings of solidarity and community spirit. The collected data was supported by evidence that very little of damage affected private homes in the area. This study clearly illustrates the subjectivity and raises another problem. As I said the interviews are interpreted by a person that person can commit research bias, and therefore interpret people words in favour to their theory. Therefore does it achieves prediction? No , the outcome of the interview cannot be predicted as the participant can say what they want. Does it achieves understanding? We can argue that it does achieve understanding because the participants data is studied in depth allowing new theories to emerge. Finally does it achieve control? As some of the psychologists would argue yes because of the different methods of coding , I still do not think that qualitative data analysis satisfie the criteria of control. Anything can happen during the investigation , there is no control of behaviour either. Confunding variables could influence the results as there is no control over variables. Therefore considering pros and cons it seems that quantitative method is not that scientific. Lets look at the quantitative methods.

Quanitative data analysis are far more scientific because of the control over variables, prediction of the behaviour and understanding. Hans Eysenck said ‘A preferable method to investigate behaviour in psychology is laboratory experiment’. Laboratory experiment is one of the methods that uses qualitative data analysis. It does have operational variables and hypothesis that allows participants to be tested . Bandura (1961) conducted laboratory experiment into the learings and imitation of the aggressive role models . He has tested children by allocating them to the groups in which children seen role model being aggressive towards the object and other half seen non-aggressive role models performing not aggressive actions to the object. He found that children were more likely to repeat actions and words when they were exposed to the aggressive role model being aggressive to the object. Please read the whole study as I will be disusing the scientifnes of this study (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Bandura/bobo.htm). The great amount of control that he used (such as big sample used of both males and females which makes more representative, as there were also observations conducted they have insured the reliability is not threeten by agreeing on the interater relaibiltiy) as well as the understanding of the subject matter and clear prediction allows this research to be considered as scientific. Therefore clearly methods that are used when conducting quantitative data analysis are far more scientific than qualitative data analysis.

On the other hand Qualitative data analysis are really beneficial to the psychochology as it enhances the understanding about specific researched behaviour. Without qualitative analysis it would be impossible to fully understand quantive resercheres . This hovewer raise the question about the psychology being a ‘’scientific discipline’’. Kuhn(1997) would still argue that despite quantiative methods used psychology cannot be considered as a pure science and therefore the methods used in psychological research are not scientific too. On the other hand we need to think about the aim of the psychology which is to analyze human behaviour. Silfe & Williams (1995) argued that when studying human behaviour it is necessary to obtain qualitative data analysis. Therefore if that’s what psychology is aiming to achieve and psychology is considered as a science of human behaviour then we can argue that qualitative data analysis are scientific as qualitative methods because both of them tries to explain our behaviour. With the difference that qualitative data provides more information’s.

Conclusively considering all prons and cons qualitative data is unscientific but the results of the analysis can be tested by using objective scientific method (quantitative ).