Qualitative Research: Qualitative research is a research method that collects & involves non-numerical data to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyses non-numerical data in order to gain an understanding of individuals’ social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation.
Approaches to qualitative research :-
Qualitative research is used to understand how people experience the world. While there are many approaches to qualitative research, they tend to be flexible and focus on retaining rich meaning when interpreting data.
Common approaches include grounded theory, ethnography, action research, phenomenological research, and narrative research.
When to use qualitative research:-
Researchers make use of qualitative research techniques when they need to capture accurate, in-depth insights. It is very useful to capture “factual data”. Here are some examples of when to use qualitative research.
- Developing a new product or generating an idea.
- Studying your product/brand or service to strengthen your marketing strategy.
- To understand your strengths and weaknesses.
- Understanding purchase behavior.
- To study the reactions of your audience to marketing campaigns and other communications.
- Exploring market demographics, segments, and customer care
- Gathering perception data of a brand, company, or product
Qualitative research methods: –
These are some of the most common qualitative methods :
- Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field notes.
- Interviews: personally, asking people questions in one-on-one conversations.
- Focus groups: asking questions and generating discussion among a group of people.
- Surveys: distributing questionnaires with open-ended questions.
- Secondary research: collecting existing data in the form of texts, images, audio or video recordings, etc.
Guidelines to improve Qualitative research:
- Define your problem or interest area: What do you observe is happening and is it frequent? Identify the data type/s you’re observing.
- Create a hypothesis: Ask yourself what the causes for the situation with those qualitative research data types could be.
- Plan your qualitative research: Use structured qualitative research instruments like surveys, focus groups, or interviews to ask questions that test your hypothesis.
- Data Collection: Collect qualitative research data and understand what your data types are telling you. Once data is collected on different types over long time periods, you can analyse it and give insights into changing attitudes and language patterns.
- Data analysis: Does your information support your hypothesis? (You may need to redo the qualitative research with other variables to see if the results improve)
- Effectively present the qualitative research data: Communicate the results in a clear and concise way to help other people understand the findings.
