Qualitative Research
What is it? Qualitative research originated in the social behavioral sciences (e.g. sociology, anthropology and psychology). Today, in the context of business, qualitative methods are employed in market, user, computer human interaction (CHI) and customer experience research.
When is it best used? When a fresh understanding of human perspectives, motivations, attitudes, behaviors, opinions, etc., on a subject is needed. Example qualitative research questions include: Why did this metric go up or down, are we building the right thing, are we building the thing right, who are my customers and what are they like, do people understand this messaging as intended, which audience should we target, etc? It is often used to help design better quantitative research and interpret output data.
Qualitative Research is also used to inform and understand trends and hypotheses.
What does it entail? Qualitative researchers use multiple methods of inquiry for data collection: Individual interviews including ethnography, contextual inquiry, dyads, triads, mini-groups, focus groups, co-design/co-creation, usability tests, card sort, concept & preference tests, etc.
The sample size is often small (particularly vs quantitative studies) and participants/respondents are recruited to represent different target audiences of interest. These could be attitudinal, behavioral or demographic in nature. (E.g. non-users and users, first time vs repeat users, older vs younger, regional biases, by household income, urban vs rural, by segmentation criteria, etc.)
Interchangeable term: “Qual” is often used as slang
Use in a sentence: The team used qualitative research to understand participants’ motivations for choosing one option over another.
Related terms: Quantitative research
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