qualitative and quantitative research in psychology 

What makes psychology a science, it is the scientific method that essentially defines a science. Psychology does not rely on superstition or magical beliefs; it is a science and what makes it a science is the scientific method. We use scientific method to study human behavior and human mental processes.

There are two ways of conducting scientific research, one uses the quantitative method and the other is the qualitative method of research. 

QUANTITATIVE METHOD:

In the quantitative method we transform psychological phenomena to numbers so that we can measure them easily. 

EXAMPLE:

For example, if we want to research anger, we will ask you how angry you feel on a scale of one to ten and if you're not feeling too angry you can say I'm feeling my anger at four and if you're feeling very much angry you can say I'm feeling nine.

So this way what we do is we transform naturally occurring psychological phenomena to some kind of numbers so that we can measure them and then we subject these same phenomena to mathematical processes so for instance we can ask a hundred people how angry they're feeling at any event and then we average their scores to say people are feeling moderately angry or extremely angry in response to some event and we would not only be able to produce an average, but also a variation saying for instance that people's anger was in the range of two to ten on a scale of one to ten and the average was 5. So, this way we will be able to express psychological phenomena numerically this approach has been developed to a very sophisticated level. 

The example is a very basic simple rudimentary one, but psychological assessment has become a very highly specialized field where we have tests that measure the extent of people's depression for example, beck's depression inventory is a set of questions that we ask people about how depressed they are, and it produces a fairly accurate representation of their mental state we also have back anxiety inventory which does the same for anxiety and so on. 

So, the purpose of sharing this knowledge with you is that you understand that the quantitative method is one that has been used predominantly in psychology.

QUALITATIVE METHOD:

But more recently the qualitative method is also being used and what is the qualitative method. The qualitative research method argues that quantifying psychological phenomena or turning them into numbers does an injustice to the reality of these phenomena. So, for instance to say that you're feeling angry at 4 on a scale of 1 to 10 does not accurately capture your anger and they would also argue that when you average two people's anger scores, you're ignoring how these two people treat numbers.

EXAMPLE:

For example, in my class teacher was asking students how angry they're feeling at the moment so one student said three and another said seven when we asked them for what it means to them it seemed like the person who was rating their anger at three was actually a lot angrier than the other person who was rating their anger at seven. So, all of us may be very similar in that we understand numbers and that we understand anger, but we may be very different on how we rate things it's just like an examiner giving 60 marks for a very good answer as opposed to another examiner giving 90 marks for a very good answer and that kind of consistency cannot be ensured in subjective evaluations. 

So therefore, the objection by the qualitative researcher is that what we measure when we're measuring these phenomena is something else something totally different from what we say we're trying to measure another objection to the quantitative method is whatever we find in the laboratory setting may not hold in the real life.

EXAMPLE:

For example, many psychology experiments are conducted in the laboratory so we find that there is a whole range of phenomena that are only experienced in the laboratory for instance experiments on backward masking where you flash stimuli for less than 16 milliseconds and our reaction time to these phenomena to the stimuli can be measured on a computer screen the only problem with that is no such phenomena exist in the outside world. So the relevance of laboratory experimentation has also been questioned by qualitative researchers so what do qualitative researchers do qualitative researchers go to people they observe them or they interview them they observe people in their natural environment they study people in their real life settings but there are criticisms to that approach also in one study when psychologists went into an organization to study people's behavior what they found was that people improved their performance when they were being observed now there's the paradox if we are going to observe somebody in their real life natural setting they're going to improve their performance because they know they're being watched and if they're going to improve their performance, how we are going to know how they perform when I'm not there so that's the paradox that's created by what we call the Hawthorne effect and in the Hawthorne effect people tend to perform better when they're being observed there are other problems with qualitative research the researchers findings are purely subjective whatever the researcher observes they observe with their own eyes and their own minds and in many numbers of their findings are considered purely subjective and perhaps even biased.

So, no matter what method we use whether we use quantitative method or qualitative method whether we study people in the laboratory or in real life there are trade-offs to each method at the same time.

I believe we need to use a bit of both we need to use qualitative methods to find ecologically valid rich data and we need quantitative measures to find scientifically valid objective data and it is the blend of both that will lead us to any significant conclusions about human behavior.