Quantitative research deals in numbers, logic, and an objective stance. It refers to a set of strategies, techniques and assumptions used to study psychological, social and economic processes through the exploration of numeric patterns. Quantitative research gathers a range of numeric data. Some of the numeric data is intrinsically quantitative such as personal income, domicile, etc. While in other cases the numeric structure is imposed for example ‘On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our product?’.

The collection of quantitative information allows researchers to conduct simple to extremely sophisticated statistical analyses that aggregate the data, it could also show relationships among the data or even compare across aggregated data. Quantitative research includes methodologies such as questionnaires, structured observations or experiments and stands in contrast to qualitative research. Qualitative research involves the collection and analysis of narratives and/or open-ended observations through methodologies such as interviews, focus groups or ethnographies.

Contrary to qualitative research that we posted last week, quantitative data is much more concise and close-ended. It can be used to ask the questions “how much” or “how many,” followed by conclusive information although this method is limited to narrow variables.