Categorized Into Two; Either Quantitative or Qualitative

¶ … categorized into two; either quantitative or qualitative research study. These two research methods are both used for data collection. However, even though they serve the same purpose they have their own differences. The paper will look at two different articles one being an example of qualitative research study and the other a quantitative research study.

Qualitative research study

The first article is on perceptions of an older patient on the role of family doctor in health promotion. This article is an example of a qualitative research study. There are various reasons why this article is a typical example of a qualitative research study. First, qualitative research looks at how and why when it comes to the process of making decisions but not just when, what, and where. For this reason only small samples that are more focused are used as opposed to larger samples. In this particular example the sample used was 20 patients aged between 65 and 87 years. This particular research is mainly concerned with the process and practice and not the outcomes.

Qualitative research focuses mainly on the perceptions of participants and their experience and how they understand their lives. For this particular example the participants were being asked to give their experiences and views on care provided by their family doctor. Another reason is the fact that qualitative research is only used to get information of the specific case that is being studied. For the article, the topic of study is how older patients perceive family doctors. The information collected from the study is about care provided by family doctors. This means that the aim of the qualitative research is to find out the views of older patients on family doctors and this is exactly what the interviews focused on. The method used to collect data in the case study in the article is in-depth interview. This makes the case a qualitative research since in-depth interviews is one of the methods used to collect data in qualitative research study.

Quantitative research study

The second article is on body mass index knowledge of older adults and motivation to change. This falls under quantitative research study due to various reasons. First, quantitative research involves systematically and empirically investigating social phenomena's using mathematical, statistical or computational techniques. It involves the reduction of the data into numbers. There are usually measurements involved in quantitative research methods. The measurements taken are termed as a way by which the observations made in the research are expressed in numerical terms so as to identify associations or casual relations. Therefore measurements in quantitative research are very important and they have a key role to play as far as collecting data and analyzing it. For this study, measurements of participant's weight and height were taken .Their weights were then divided by height. The data was then classified into four categories underweight for