While quantitative methods have historically been the gold standard for research, and while mainly quantitative data is still desired by funding and accountability sources to show outcomes, the value of qualitative research should not be underestimated and is gaining the acknowledgment and creditability it deserves as a valid method of study. When qualitative and quantitative research techniques are used to complement each other, the data achieves a level of completion that cannot be achieved when either approach is absent.
Qualitative tools, used in conjunction with quantitative tools, frequently give more depth and shading to an assessment process because they allow for subjective information, specifically the contribution of individual feedback, opinions, perspectives, and experiences. These types of measures include but are not limited to focus groups, in-depth interviews, and case studies/descriptions.
Focus Groups:
- A focus group usually has between six and ten people and lasts one to two hours.
- Specific topics are planned for group discussion, and focus group facilitators need to be prepared and skilled in recruiting and executing a group.
- Focus groups are meant to reveal multiple perspectives and are best suited to address questions that discuss policy or practice.
- Information revealed in a group discussion will often be richer, more complete, and more pertinent than information that can be obtained in individual interviews, surveys, or questionnaires.
- Primary advantages:
- The open, frank, and spontaneous discussion format allows for a great deal of honesty and depth in individual responses and is very useful for exploring topics or populations that are new, understudied, or hard-to-reach.
- This format also leads to the capability of recording the exact narrative, thus obtaining a full transcript of the discussion for later review and analysis of themes (recurring key points in the dialogue).
- Primary disadvantages:
- This technique tends to be time-consuming, especially when it comes to recruiting members of hard-to-reach populations in the community and the transcribing of dialogue. It can also be somewhat expensive because of the resources it takes to recruit, execute, and transcribe.
- Results are from too small a sample to be statistically significant; therefore, results from a focus group cannot be generalized to other groups or populations.
In-depth Interviews:
- Interviews are typically conducted in person or on the phone and can vary in duration and scope. Interviews range on a continuum from completely closed-ended (structured with prepared responses for the interviewee to choose from) to completely open-ended (unstructured with no prepared responses)
- As with focus groups, it helps to have a prepared, skilled facilitator who can successfully relate to the interviewees without prejudicing their responses.
- Primary advantages:
- The format allows for the ability to receive in-depth responses to questions.
- As with focus groups, these narrative answers can be recorded verbatim.
- Primary disadvantages:
- Like focus groups, this technique can be rather time-consuming and expensive in regards to resources.
- Results are from too small a sample to be statistically significant; therefore, results cannot be generalized to other groups or populations.
Case Studies/Descriptions:
- Case descriptions are an in-depth look at a specific individual (or group) situation, moving outward from that person (or group) to analyzing how people and systems interact with the person or group in question.
- Case descriptions can be anecdotal, such as a professor reciting how he and a student with a disability collaborated with Disability Support Services (DSS) to arrange for a note taker as an in-class accommodation and resulting outcomes. Though contextual emphasis may shift from the student to the professor to the DSS office to the note taker, the primary focus of a case description is a select individual and his/her experiences with the outside world.
- Case descriptions can also be obtained through more empirically rigorous means. For example, in single or multiple case study designs, a student or very small sample of students are followed longitudinally (over time), with several different data collection points to determine a baseline and subsequent data points to measure change in comparison with the baseline. In short, a person essentially serves as both experiment and control. For example, in a classroom setting, data collection points frequently consist of baseline observations of a student’s social or learning behavior with follow-up observations to evaluate the impact of an intervention, resulting in a type of pretest-posttest design.
- Primary advantages:
- This technique allows for in-depth exploration of a particular person or group over time.
- For empirical rigor in a case study, a variety of quantitative and statistical measures can be used at different data collection points to supplement qualitatively obtained information.
- Having multiple observers in a classroom over time or several persons reporting on events and experiences from different perspectives allows for cross-comparison and corroboration of common observations and findings, thus enhancing validity of the results.
- Primary disadvantages:
- As with other qualitative techniques, this method can be rather time consuming and expensive.
- Generalizability to other populations is limited.
- Repeated access to a particular setting may be difficult to obtain.
