Qualitative research

Qualitative research explores the why: through interviews, group conversations and observation it seeks the motives, language, context and meaning behind behaviour. It yields not percentages but understanding: which considerations are in play, in what words the audience talks, which frictions no figure reveals. That makes it the discipline's hypothesis machine: it generates the questions and concepts that quantitative research can then test and weigh. The limit is equally clear: small, non-representative numbers and participants' rationalisations tolerate no generalisation. Qualitative without a quantitative test is a story; the reverse is figures without meaning.

Covered in