Learning Activity 6.4

I apologize in advance if some of this post seems repeated from 5.4. I didn’t realize that the question would be repeated in this unit for qualitative. Otherwise, I would have made my post a bit more specific to quantitative. Allow me to briefly reiterate what I said in my 5.4 post as I believe it applies to qualitative analysis as well:

“The methods section of an article is the area that is most at risk of confusing readers. It is easy to get bogged down in numbers and statistical wordiness.”

The only comment I would add that applies to qualitative would be that the method section, in this case, risks being too broad. Unlike quantitative research, qualitative is less specific to begin with. With qualitative work, I think the risk would be more tuned to what I said above about wordiness because this type of research is designed to be more specific. Unlike my 5.4 post, I found the article I looked at this week to not be in danger of being too broad or too wordy. I thought it was well laid out, which is unusual for a methods section for me. This could be indicative of a personal preference towards qualitative work over quantitative.

The question I would like to ask for this unit is whether or not quantitative and qualitative methods are really all that different? Aside from the charts in the textbook, would you have known that there was even a disparity between the two? I ask because I don’t think I would have. I believe the text over exaggerates the degree of difference between qualitative and quantitative research Yes there is a difference, but I don’t think the difference permeates every single section down to minute details.