Qualitative vs quantitative research findings

The essential difference between what one learns from qualitative vs quantitative research (in their most common forms) is this: Quantitative research helps an organization know things about a person, where qualitative research helps an organization know a person.

To know about someone means to grasp particular attributes of the thing or factual knowledge pertaining to him. When one knows about a person, the person is perceived less as a perceiving, experiencing, knowing entity than as something that is perceived, experienced, known. In other words, the person is comprehended objectively, as an observable, behaving object — a passive non-participant in the process of coming to an understanding.

To know someone means to understand that person specifically as a perceiving, experiencing, knowing entity: a subject. And this someone is an active participant in the researcher’s coming to understanding, not something set apart to observe and analyze. This does not mean the participant is not observed, only that the observations as such are not the primary focus. In essence what is going on is the participant is showing the researcher his world as he sees it.

The type of knowledge gained through qualitative research is not possessed in the way discrete facts are possessed (though facts can come to light through it). The essential knowledge consists in how facts — and more generally, symbols — are interrelated and applied in concrete life.  (I’ve been reading Clifford Geertz, and finding his way of thinking about these problems useful.) This symbol system is bound up with how the person sees life in general, which aspects and details of life are relevant and have particular significance, how he feels about it, participates in it, and tries to influence it.

Another way to say it: quantitative research produces facts about people; qualitative research provides insights into how to relate to people.

Of course, in the language-leveling environment of business, flat facts are often branded as “insights”, but the difference between fact and insight is an important one and the distinction ought to be preserved. The difference between a fact and an insight is that a fact can be subsumed by one’s current mode of understanding without serious disruption. Facts are comfortable. Compared with insights “hard facts” are easy. An insight, to the degree it is an insight, causes disruption to one’s own understanding and effects a sort of perspectival shift or vase-face remapping of understanding, similar to what happens at the end of a mystery novel when the truth comes to light and forces a comprehensive remapping of significance to the clues and incidental facts of the story into a new understanding. The characteristic charms of the mystery novel genre  revolve around the transfiguring insight, the pleasures of attempting to anticipate what will be revealed, in succeeding or even better, in failing. If the novel concluded with just the addition of the missing fact, and the story did not gain a retroactive reinterpretation through it, the readers would be disgusted. This is also how great qualitative research works. A finding of the form of “47% of customers prefer the color red over green” is a fact, not an insight.

The chances of gaining this type of insight is diminished if one remains removed, uninvolved and objective, in accordance with the ideal of physical science. The researcher must engage in dialogue in order to learn how to communicate naturally with the person being researched, which means becoming conversant in that person’s symbol system — which means knowing what the symbols mean — which means not only knowing what the symbols represent, but also how the symbols are used and experienced, effectively and affectively.

But this does not mean one can dispense with rigor. It is completely possible to go drastically wrong subjectively, and as with physical science, the qualitative researcher’s own subjectivity is always the primary suspect in the crimes of distorted  findings — but in qualitative research the researchers stance toward subjectivity as such is completely different. In the physical sciences (at least in the “normal science” mode of research) minimizing subjectivity as such is desirable. In qualitative research for design and strategy, the very “object” of one’s understanding is subjectivity. Again, this is a source of discomfort for people who equate knowledge with objectivity, epitomized by the physical sciences. In qualitative research the charge that one’s findings are “subjective” is to deny the validity of qualitative research as such, seeing that the goal of qualitative research is to understand subjectivity.

In qualitative research the risk is in imposing one’s own subjectivity on the subjectivity being studied, thus obscuring it. However, the  researcher cannot try to eliminate his own subjectivity in the process of research, but rather to make appropriate use of it, empathically substantiating the insights. The insight is not transferred from the research participant to the researcher: the researcher, by way of looking out at the world with the participant, finds a subjective understanding within his own experience that dialogically matches that of his participant.

Crap. Out of time…