Qualitative Methods

Where quantitative research counts, measures, and compares numbers, qualitative research seeks to understand the meaning, experience, and context of human behavior in the participants' own terms. It produces rich, descriptive, non-numerical data, usually in the form of words, and is especially useful for exploring how people interpret their lives, why they behave as they do, and what phenomena mean to them. Rather than testing a narrow hypothesis, qualitative researchers often begin with open questions and allow themes to emerge from the data. Three widely used methods are interviews, observations, and focus groups.

Interviews are guided conversations designed to gather detailed information. A structured interview uses a fixed set of predetermined questions asked in the same order, making