1. STEP 6 ELEMENTS of RESEARCH DESIGN by Yuksel Ekinci (PhD) Professor of Marketing Oxford Brookes University

4. 4 Contrasting Qualitative & Quantitative Methods Research Goals/ Objectives Discovery and identification of new ideas, thoughts, feelings, preliminary insights, understanding of ideas and objects Validation of facts, estimating relationships, predicting variables Type of Research Normally exploratory designsDescriptive or hypothesis testing. Type of Questions Open-ended, semi-structured, Deep probing Mostly structured Time of Execution Relatively shorter time framesSignificantly longer time frames Representativeness Small samples, limited to the sampled respondents Large samples, normally good representation of target population Type of Analyses Debriefing, subjective, content, interpretative, semiotic analyses Statistical, descriptive, causal or predictions of relationships Researcher Skills Interpersonal communications, observations, interpretative skills Statistical data analysis skills, translation abilities and some subjective interpretative skills Generalizability of Results Very limited; only preliminary insights and understanding Usually very good; inferences about facts, estimates of relationship Key Factors Qualitative Methods Quantitative Methods Source: Hair, Bush, and Ortinau, (2000, p. 215)