Sometimes the "cold hard facts" that can be backed up by strong statistical analyses are necessary. Thus, while qualitative methods may help one to determine what intervention will work best for a particular individual; quantitative methods may be best relied upon when one needs to know what intervention has been the most successful within a particular population. Thus, when choosing a new intervention for treating an addictions group, it may be better to rely on the data provided by quantitative (experimental) research (Reis & Judd, 2000).
The major strengths of qualitative research lie in its ability to ask the questions "how" and "why" -- questions that often provide much more interesting answers than "who, when, and what." Qualitative methods are able to provide the crucial context behind anonymous data points, providing a more detailed and nuanced understanding of human behavior that simply cannot be replicated by the closed nature of quantitative questions. Often a single interview, ethnographic inquiry or focus group can provide mountains of useful and informative data to sift through that quantitative methods simply could not achieve. The detailed information of qualitative methods does, however, come at a price (Mahoney & Goertz, 2006). Due to the often-interactive nature of qualitative research, sample sizes are often significantly smaller. It is simply not possible to conduct in depth, time consuming interviews with thousands of participants for a single study, as can be done when using pen and paper questionnaires. Qualitative methods also produce data that is limited in terms of the statistical analyses that can be used. This can in turn limit the conclusions that can be drawn based on qualitative research, for instance making cause and effect relationships nearly impossible to determine with any respectable degree of statistical certainty (Rubin, 2007).
Qualitative research...
In quantitative research, the aim is to produce results that can be generalized to a larger population. In other words, if a researcher conducts a quantitative study on the effectiveness of a specific medication on ADHD in children, the researcher will want to be sure that his or her findings can be applied to many children, and not only the children in his or her specific study. In qualitative research the goal is not to have findings that can be generalized to larger populations of people, but rather findings that are transferable to different contexts. While generalizability can be achieved through random sampling, transferability is achieved through providing 'data-rich' descriptions and detailed information about procedures, sampling, interventions and analysis that allow an individual to determine whether or not the method used and findings may be applicable in their own context (Erlandson et al., 1993).
References
Denzin, Norman K. & Lincoln, Yvonna S. (Eds.). (2005). The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Erlanson, a. et al. (1993). Doing Naturalistic Inquiry: A Guide to Methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Holliday, a.R. (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research, 2nd Edition. London: Sage Publications
Mahoney, J & Goertz, G. (2006) a Tale of Two Cultures: Contrasting Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Political Analysis, 14, 227 -- 249
Pawluch D. & Shaffir W. & Miall C. (2005). Doing Ethnography: Studying Everyday Life. Toronto, on Canada: Canadian Scholars' Press.
Reis, H.T. & Judd, C.M. (2000). Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rubin, a. (2007). Practitioner's guide to using…
