In: Psychology
Explain the role and reasons for both quantitative and qualitative methods in describing a population's health.
Quantitative approaches provide reliable, measurable data on mental health and social needs. Quantitative approaches typically concentrate on predicting any experimental study (or other setting) found in a larger population. Such approaches also include evaluation of how individuals communicate with a non-subject matter controlled unit in social interaction. These research may be used to study emotions, coping strategies, or counter-strategies. For example, psychotherapy observational work is largely effective in understanding attachment processes. Research using quantitative approaches concentrate on specific situations or circumstances under controlled conditions, creating current estimation models and data, and predicting what will happen in a particular situation in a larger population. Studies of individual behaviors may therefore be used to track causal interactions in the population and explain an underlying process. Quantitative approaches specifically describe what is measured and how patterns are calculated, such as behavior, motivation, emotion and cognition, quantitative data collection is considered much more comprehensive than qualitative methods. Quantitative research methods usually involve different types of questionnaires and surveys, formal interviews, and behavioral observation. Thus qualitative approach is mainly used for exploring and gaining an in-depth understanding of individual perceptions, emotions, viewpoints and patterns, and digging deeper into the issue at hand. A qualitative researcher's data collection toolkit is very versatile, from entirely unstructured to semi-structured techniques. The most widely used qualitative approaches include individual interviews , group discussions and behavioral observations. Usually, data obtained in qualitative studies are in the form of text or visual images, which provide rich sources of information, but appear to be bulky and time-consuming to code and analyze. Systematic process is a more systematic way to characterize the population as a whole, considering societal issues , social variables and cultural norms. Qualitative research may help to better explain the trends or circumstances impacting the lives of people, such as the effect of a new product on customer preferences. Quantitative methods concentrate on analyzing people's actions in and out of the laboratory, while qualitative methods describe the personality of the individual and how that person could communicate with the environment.