Question

The nature of qualitative research - What do you see as the greatest strength of qualitative research and the biggest weakness?

Answer 1

Data from qualitative studies describes the qualities or characteristics of something. Unlike quantitative research, one cannot easily reduce these descriptions to numbers. Qualitative data includes information about user behaviors, needs, desires, routines, use cases, and a variety of other information which are of absolute necessity in life.

Biggest strength of qualitative research :

Unlike quantitative research which requires the standardization of data collection to allow statistical comparison, in qualitative research, a researcher must observe and document behaviors, opinions, patterns, needs, pain points, and other types of information. i.e qualitative research requires flexibility which often helps the researcher when facing certain characteristics which are not measurable in real life (not quantitative)

Biggest weakness of qualitative research :

In Qualitative research, data analysis becomes difficult as no numerical data is available. So the researchers look for trends in the data. Hence conclusions become subjective and not exact which is the biggest drawback of this research.