Advantages and Disadvantages of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in Health and Social Care - Essay Example

Advantages and disadvantages of quantitative and qualitative methods in health and social care research Health care Professor 12th July 2006 Advantages and disadvantages of quantitative and qualitative methods in health and social care research The crucial nature of research lies in its objective of creating new knowledge in a field. This is done through a process of systematic enquiry overseen by scientific principles. The principles differ in accordance to the specific science or discipline in which the research is undertaken (Cormack 2000 p.3). What is nursing research and how does it differ from other research A number of definitions of nursing research have been put forth and there is no right or wrong answer since nursing covers a diverse range of activities and construed differently in other parts of the world, and because it changes over time, a definition should make provisions for these disparities. A basic definition of nursing research: "Nursing research is research that goes into those aspects of professional activity which are predominantly and appropriately the concern and responsibility of nurses. (Cormack 2000 p.5)" Usually nursing research will encompass activities where nurses are involved in nursing education, administration of nursing services, and other aspects of nursing practice. With regards to research process, a succession of logical steps that comprise scientific method needs to be followed in order to develop existing knowledge. A diverse mix of several disciplines comprise nursing and any of them might warrant further research. For example patients' anxiety may be observed and studied from a physiological standpoint which means biological sciences can be called upon to offer appropriate scientific guidelines and provide patients with corrective care to counter their anxieties. Nursing research may be aimed at testing theories developed in other settings. For example, organizational theories developed in other industries have been assessed in nursing. Research that is formulated to test general theories in certain situations is termed as deductive research. Usually this kind of research starts with an idea and utilizes data to confirm or refute the idea (Thorne 2000). The converse of this is inductive research which can also be tested in nursing where a certain situation is taken as the starting point and patterns produced may lead to a creation of a hypotheses or proposition of general theories which can be experimented deductively. Usually inductive research uses data to create the ideas and hypothesis (Thorne 2000). A number of quantitative studies require inductive reasoning in contrast to qualitative research that involves a wide range of research strategies. In health care sciences quantitative research starts with a theoretical grounding and applies a sequence of actions to confirm or refute a hypothesis. Qualitative reasoning says that the meaning of a phenomenon can only be understood and deciphered by an interpretive understanding. Qualitative research is a type of social investigation, concentrating on the different approaches that people employ to interpret their experiences and their environment (Holloway 2002 p.3). This type of research encompasses various approaches but all have a central aim which is to understand the social reality or individuals, groups and traditions. Apart from being a tool to explore change, with qualitative research, researchers are able to investigate behaviour, feelings and experiences of people and examine their core principles. This interpretive methodology to social reality and describing human experiences, is the basis of qualitative research. Although all forms of quantitative research are useful and valuable, qualitative researchers view it as limited because it does not take into account the participants' experiences. Also researchers employing these approaches are not intrinsically concerned about the human aspects but only with studied facts, measurable behaviour, cause and effect. Also this type of research does not satisfactorily answers questions about the nature of the human condition. Essentially quantitative research is important to solve many types of research problem. Qualitative research is appropriate for various types of questions. Although qualitative along with quantitative research appears to complete the entire research process, qualitative methods do have their criticisms. This type of research is sometimes labelled as 'unscientific' since qualitative data is subjective and hence biased and that this type of research is hard to duplicate and often ends up being more anecdotal and just someone's personal opinion (Mays & Pope p.2). Both "qualitative research" and "qualitative methods" are terms which can be interchangeably used but the former, strictly speaking, refers to a particular research technique employed for data gathering about the society. Examples of research techniques are questionnaires in survey research, polls etc. A social scientist chooses a research method by a research strategy which is a group of decisions, or a theoretical perspective, about the research design and general views on how society can be studied in order to collect data and study the results. Types of qualitative research are: Ethnography Symbolic interactionism or Grounded theory Constructionism Ethnomethodology Phenomenology The choice of which method to use and apply will usually be determined by the research question or by the researcher's theoretical position which is the case in health care research where research is aimed at particular problems and issues. In nursing research, among the above methods, the commonly ones used are: phenomenology, ethnography and grounded theory (Ploeg 1999). Phenomenology aims to describe real and lived experience of people and refrains from creating theories on the studied phenomena. The real world forms the primary source of data and the participants scrutinized, interviews conducted are a widespread means of collecting data. Ethnography aims to learn or gather more information about a culture and its people where the culture can be a society, community, organization or a nation. The process involves meetings, face to face interactions with the culture and taking part in their social traditions. Data is collected through observation and interviewing to delve into the culture's activities and knowledge. Grounded theory aims to discover social-psychological processes and involves theoretical sampling and continuous comparative method using observation and interviewing for data collection. Theoretical sampling is the criteria that are chosen to select participants based on their knowledge of the issue. For example, a survey to discover how many obese people exercise would narrow the sampling range to those individuals whose weight exceeds well beyond normal levels. While analysing data, researchers constantly compares incidents, categories, people and other factors to ascertain similarities and differences and state a theory that answers differences in behaviour (Ploeg 1999). Both quantitative and qualitative methods require careful sampling in order to minimize bias while appraising research (Thompson 1999). Sampling refers to the study, not of the entire population which is obviously impractical, but a small proportion of the populace and the results generated can be applicable to the population from where the sample was studied. Here, the factor of external validity crops up. This is the scale at which the results can be generalized to the population and nursing research needs to carefully consider some threats when deciding whether those results can be applied to patients under their supervision. Sampling differs in quantitative and qualitative research. The former is often employed when researchers mention statements about the probabilities of an 'occurrence' in a population. For example, a person is 65% less likely to die a cardiac related death if he eats a Mediterranean type diet as opposed to the American Heart Association's Step 1 diet (Thompson 1999). Sampling in qualitative research uses non-probability methods for studies. For example, a researcher wishing to know about the core of an unhappy health care experience cannot take a random sample from the population most of whom would have had pleasant experiences. Instead, by studying hospital records of patient complaints, he could take a sample and undertake investigations about the nature of their unhappy experiences (Thompson 1999). As qualitative research seeks to interpret social phenomena, it is referred to as interpretative research. Since it does not aim to quantify or enumerate, and generally deals with talk or words rather than numbers, it is viewed as not "measuring" and seen as unable to explain social phenomena. In qualitative research, measurement is concerned with classification and seeks to answer questions such as, "what is X, and how does X vary in different circumstances and why" rather than asking question such as "how big is X or how many Xs are there" which are quantitative in nature (Mays & Pope p.3). Qualitative research seeks to "go behind the scenes" of everyday life instead of accepting explanations of social phenomena, it strives to ask underlying questions about life. For example, rather than offering statistics on the number of suicides the researcher using qualitative methods asks "what is suicide" and points out that it is a social phenomena involving the explanations, definitions and investigations from legal experts, coroners, health professionals and family members among others. With this in mind, we see that the nature of and reasons for suicide varies between individuals from different countries, cultures, religions and over time. Another aspect of qualitative research is that studies take place not in labs, artificial or experimental settings, instead in natural ones where people go about their everyday lives. When people are observed or studied in their own environment, it is termed as naturalism and this kind of qualitative method is known as naturalistic method. A third feature of qualitative research is that it may make use of several different methods of research such as conducting interviews, focus groups etc. This multi-method approach is sometimes employed in health care to confront issues about social phenomena, varying from complicated human behaviours such as patients' consent to treatment, and decision making by health care workers. Over the years the differences between qualitative research and quantitative research has become more pronounced. Qualitative research has been aligned with interpretive approaches and quantitative research has been aligned with "structural" or positivist approach (Mays & Pope p.5). Researchers on either side have become dismissive or ignorant of the other's work leading to misunderstanding especially of qualitative research in health care services. In addition the increasing feeling that the dissimilarities between qualitative and quantitative research in sociology are not accurate may be trickling into the health care services where both methods of research are being mutually used to solve research social problems. One way to harness the best of both qualitative and quantitative research is not to look as them as opposites but rather as complementary to each other. The easiest way to do this is to use qualitative research as a first step or preliminary to quantitative approach. This works well in health care research which deals with people who are more complex than the subjects of natural sciences. Qualitative research plays a role in validating quantitative research or offering another opinion on a particular social behaviour and can sometimes prompt a review of quantitative data. For example, when answering surveys, Nepalese villagers feigned ignorance of family planning and abortion giving false answers to their use of contraception. Their behaviour was due to cultural traditions and unfamiliarity with questionnaires and the study revealed some limitations about gathering quantitative data without properly knowing the background of the people being scrutinized. This example gives validity to qualitative research to reveal social behaviour which are not quantifiable by quantitative research. Health care increasingly uses this method to reform the service and allow a greater interaction and understanding between patients and health care professionals. In sociological research process, the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods revolves around the concept of "triangulation" which can be understood in three different ways: Triangulation as mutual validation, triangulation as the integration of different perspectives on the investigated phenomenon and triangulation in its original trigonometrical meaning (Kelle 2001). Triangulation must not be viewed as a single unique method, rather as an unclear metaphor with alternate meanings. In sociological research, when qualitative and quantitative data are combined and collected using triangulation method, one of the three outcomes may occur. 1. qualitative and quantitative results may converge: in such a case these results lead to the same conclusions, 2. qualitative and quantitative results may relate to different phenomena, but may be complementary to each other and thus can be used to supplement each other, 3. qualitative and quantitative results may be divergent or contradictory (Kelle 2001). The main goal of the multi-method combination is the convergence of research results. This should be seen as the purpose of triangulation. Conflicting results might render one or both methods invalid. If complementary results occur, they would be seen as erroneous. However if complementary results are seen as the purpose of triangulation, then the above convergent results may be regarded as useless and any divergent or contradictory findings would be viewed as erroneous. Conclusion The purpose of research in nursing is to expand the amount of knowledge about the professional activity of nurses, either in nursing education or administration etc. Qualitative research has been useful in uncovering hidden data and influencing changes in health care procedure such as waiting lists, AIDS registrations etc. Combining quantitative survey and with ethnographic analysis into the structure and significance of local information in certain cultural environments seems to be the ideal way to obtain suitable explanations of social phenomena. Rather than the two schools of thought battling their point of view, researchers would do well to effectively employ the diverse offerings of the different research methodologies. Using the three approaches to qualitative research allows nursing researchers to answer pertinent questions about health care of patients by garnering a wealth of data each approach yields. With the new information gathered, nursing practice is able to acquire a deeper understanding of the participant's experiences. References Cormack, Desmond F. (2000). The Research Process in Nursing. Blackwell Publishing, Inc. p.3-5 Holloway, Immy and Wheeler, Stephanie (2002). Qualitative Research in Nursing. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. p.3 Kelle, Udo (2001). Sociological Explanations Between Micro And Macro Integration Of Qualitative And Quantitative Methods. Vol. 2, No.1 http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/1-01/1-01kelle-e.htm Mays, Nicholas and Pope, Catherine (2000). Qualitative Research in Health Care. BMJ Publishing Group. p.2-5 Ploeg, Jenny (1999). Identifying the best research design to fit the question. Part 2: Qualitative Designs. Retrieved 6th Jul 06 from http://ebn.bmjjournals.com Thompson, Carl (1999). If you could just provide me with a sample: Examining sampling in qualitative and quantitative research. Retrieved 8th Jul 06 from http://ebn.bmjjournals.com Thorne, Sally (2000). Data Analysis in qualitative research. Retrieved 7th Jul 06 from http://ebn.bmjjournals.com Read More