Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Comparative Research Anthony Sealey University of Toronto This material is distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License, the full details of which may be found online here: You may re-use, edit, or redistribute the content provided that the original source is cited, it is for non- commercial purposes, and provided it is distributed under a similar license.

Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Comparative Research Broadly speaking, most of the principal research techniques used by political scientists can be located within one of two principal categories: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative approaches to research are often centered on linguistic or discursive analysis, whereas quantitative approaches tend to focus on statistical analyses of quantifiable data. Drawing comparisons between similar qualitative and quantitative approaches are helpful for illustrating this distinction.

e.g. #1 Interviews vs. Survey Research One qualitative approach to political science research is to interview subjects about their knowledge of particular political events or processes. Such an approach is highly analogous to survey research, which is a quantitative approach that also asks research subjects to respond to a series of questions.

e.g. #1 Interviews vs. Survey Research Perhaps the biggest difference between these two approaches is that the set of responses that research subjects can provide are highly structured in survey research, whereas interviews allow research participants greater latitude to respond to questions in whichever way they prefer.

e.g. #1 Interviews vs. Survey Research For the survey researcher, having a fixed set of possible responses is crucial, as it allows for the application of statistical techniques to the data once it is aggregated; but from the interviewer’s perspective, forcing subjects to respond in a limited number of ways eliminates the potential for original, creative or unexpected responses.

e.g. #2 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Content Analysis Political scientists use both qualitative and quantitative techniques to analyze the content of political document.

e.g. #2 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Content Analysis Qualitative content analysis generally involves carefully reading and coding passages of the text of each document. Conversely, quantitative content analysis usually involves more mechanized analytic processes, such as generating counts of specific words in given sets of documents.

e.g. #2 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Content Analysis Here, the biggest difference between these two approaches is the degree of involvement of the researcher in the analytic process. But again, the outcome is a relative de- emphasis of linguistic or discursive detail in quantitative research.

e.g. #3 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Public Policy Analysis Sometimes the goal of political science research is to determine the effects of specific policies on particular social outcomes. e.g. What is the effect of varying approaches to health policy on the overall level of citizens’ health?

e.g. #3 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Public Policy Analysis In some instances, researchers use qualitative approaches to assess these relationships by providing detailed case studies of particular countries’ social policies and citizens’ health.

e.g. #3 Qualitative vs. Quantitative Public Policy Analysis In other instances, researchers use quantitative approaches to assess these relationships by attempting to establish correlations between types of social policies and levels of citizens’ health.

So generally speaking, it seems reasonable to conclude that qualitative approaches often allows for the inclusion of more fine- grained, detailed analysis by the researcher. On the other hand, because it requires less attention to detail, quantitative research often allows for an analysis of a greater breadth and quantity of data.

What do we mean by a ‘greater quantity of data’? e.g. #1 Interviews vs. Survey Research > more subjects. e.g. #2 Content Analysis > more texts. e.g. #3 Public Policy Analysis > more countries (or provinces, etc.).