Welcome to the dark side: a journey from quantitative to qualitative research.
- SciEnvy
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
One of the most exciting parts of doing a PhD is learning new techniques and applying new scientific methods. However, sometimes this can be a stark transitionary period which can leave you turning everything you thought about science on your head. This is what it was like for me when I started my PhD as it felt like I needed to make the switch between everything I had learned in my quantitative degree in animal science to conducting qualitative interviews for the first chapter of my thesis. In this short article, I will delve into the mindset shift needed to adapt from quantitative to qualitative research and what I learnt along the way!
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Sample size is not everything: quality over quantity!
When designing my first qualitative study, all I could think about was “how many people do I need to interview?” This sample size anxiety was a result of spending 5 years at university conducting power calculations to ensure I had a sufficient sample size to see a true significant difference in my Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) statistical test. However, often in qualitative research, you will not be using significance as a measure of whether a result is ‘a true result’ or not. Instead, it is likely that you will run your study either until you decide that you have enough data or once you have reached ‘saturation’ (i.e. the same, or similar, answers are coming up again and again by new participants). This means that the new information you are getting from collecting this data is limited.
For my study, I carried on until I believed that I had reached saturation with my participants, which left me having conducted 18 interviews. Yes, it did mean that I was left with ‘gaps’ in my sample and, yes, it does also mean that I hadn't captured every viewpoint on the planet. But that is something you have to accept when you're doing qualitative research. It's more about the interesting and in-depth information you can gather from your participants; you're more likely to get higher quality data with less participants than if you did lots of interviews that lacked detail.
There is some subjectivity in qual but that does not mean that it is a space for your opinion.
Another surprise I had when I started my qualitative interviews, was that I was finding myself with an opinion about the subject I was studying. Thats only natural as it is likely that you will have an opinion about the topic you are doing because you have got as far as doing a PhD in it! This can be the same in quantitative research where you have a vested interest in something working or want a certain result from your work. However, in quantitative research I believe the systems in place, such as randomised control, are rigid to ensure that experiments are conducted completely fairly. However, in qualitative research, difference between the participants is integral, meaning that there is a danger that your subjective opinion could influence the results. Again, this is something that was quite scary to me at the time but it's actually quite easy to not influence your results and that's just by being an active listener and ensuring that you take what the person says in an
interview/questionnaire/focus group as they've said it and not twist it into your own opinion. Also, using a recognised method such as thematic analysis can make sure that you give equal weight to differing opinions which ensures individual comments are all regarded equally by the researcher.
Ethics approval takes a long time (and I mean a long time).
Ethics approval is something that you might need for both quantitative and qualitative research. What I didn't realise when I started my interview journey was how long the process of the ethical approval would take and the amount of detail you have to provide to the ethics committee as you are going to be collecting data from human participants. My advice for this would be to start on your ethics form early on in the research process and get a lot of it out the way whilst you are designing the interview questions. If you don't submit your ethics approval before finishing the interview questions, then you will not be able to recruit participants until it has been approved so it can really slow you down.
Uses your soft skills.
Something I've particularly enjoyed about qualitative research has been the opportunity to use some of my soft skills in the research process. By soft skills I mean things like communication, empathy, listening, and general conversational skills. This is not something that I came across in the quantitative science world where objectivity was essential to getting accurate results and you felt quite detached from the experiment you were doing. Whereas in my social science study, I felt more immersed in the experiences of others and in the study itself. The skills used for the analysis of qualitative research are really different quantitative research and this is something that might suit you better or worse depending on your skill set. For me, instead of finding myself struggling over trying to understand certain statistical methods, I instead used my problem-solving skills in a different way to think about how I could analyse the data to show a representative result. It has also encouraged more creativity when writing the paper for this bit of work because there isn't necessarily a set format for writing the results of qualitative research in the same way that there is for quantitative research and it's actually allowed me to make my paper a bit more interesting and punchier.
This book is a must: Social Research Methods, Alan Bryman
So, I hope this article has left you excited about making the switch from quantitative to qualitative research. However, you might still be left with the question on how do I make this work? Now that would be a whole another blog article but, if you want to get started, I highly recommend the Social Research methods book by Alan Bryman. It is a very clear account of the differences between qualitative and quantitative research and how to carry out robust qualitative research (Bryman, A., 2015. Social research methods – 5th edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.). You could also do a training course on qualitative methods, which is whatI did this with the UEA PGR online school. Thisis open to people from subscribing universities, see link (https://bookwhen.com/ueaonlinetraining#focus=ev-sn04-20250128190000).
Happy researching!
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