How does the purpose and function of qualitative research differ from that of quantitative research?
While the purposes of qualitative and quantitative research may overlap, it is helpful to distinguish between: • the role of qualitative research in eliciting explanations of social behaviour in particular populations getting at the detailed “why?” and “how?”; and • the role of quantitative research in testing a particular hypothesis about the relative importance of different variables for social behaviour in the general population. These differences are associated with different approaches to knowledge and theory building. Qualitative research tends to use an inductive approach to develop theory. In other words, it examines the data generated from the study of a particular population and builds an understanding of social behaviour as it emerges from the data. In contrast, quantitative research tends to take a deductive approach, starting with a hypothesis and testing it to see if it holds true for the general population. This is called deductive analysis. For example, if we proceed in
