What are the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative research?

Qualitative studies are used by firms to provide a more detailed and or unconstrained understanding of customer experiences. In most cases, the results of qualitative studies are based upon dozen of interviews. Qualitative studies are not designed to provide insight that is project able to the customer population. Qualitative studies are used for initial exploration of experiences and topics or to probe more deeply the reasons behind customer perception. “Focus groups” and “one-on-ones” are common examples of qualitative studies.

Advantages of Qualitative Research

  1. Obtaining a more realistic feel of the world that cannot be experienced in the numerical data and statistical analysis used in quantitative research.
  2. Flexible ways to perform data collection, subsequent analysis, and interpretation of collected information.
  3. Provide a holistic view of the phenomena under investigation,
  4. Ability to interact with the research subject in their own language and on their own terms.
  5. Descriptive capability based on primary and unstructured data.

Disadvantages of Qualitative Research

  1. Departing from the original objectives of the research in response to the changing nature of the context.
  2. Arriving to different conclusions based on the same information depending on the personal characteristics of the researcher.
  3. Inability to investigate causality between different research phenomena.
  4. Difficulty in explaining the difference in the quality and quantity of information obtained from different respondents and arriving at different, non-consistent conclusions.
  5. Requiring a high level of experiences from the researcher to obtain the targeted information from the respondent.
  6. Lacking consistency and reliability because the researcher an employ different probing techniques and the respondent can choose to tall some particular stories and ignore others.

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