GCU The Methods Used in Researchs Discussion Response

Respond with a comment to  the discussion question below:

“Qualitative researchers are not so concerned with reliability but rather with a concept called dependability.  With dependability, the emphasis is not on the stable and reproducible, rather it is about how the researcher responds to and makes sense of changing contexts” (Schmidt, 2018).  “Quantitative research involves measurements that are reproducible and accurate, also known as direct measures.  Direct measures are concrete objects that can be measured, such as heart rate, weight, or temperature” (Schmidt, 2018).

Strengths of qualitative research are the understanding of beliefs, assumptions, and behavior of values.  Qualitative research also leads to more exploration with broad, open-ended questions (Choy, 2014). Strengths of quantitative research are the critical analysis of the data increasing reliability, the short term time frame for the actual survey, numerical data for groups, and the extent to whether or not survey respondents agree or disagree (Choy, 2014).

Weaknesses of qualitative research are a high volume of data for interpretation, and the skills of the interviewer must be refined to control this data without limiting the study. It can be time consuming to organize and categorize the huge amount of data and it can also be difficult to define an objectively verifiable result (Choy, 2014).  Weaknesses of quantitative research are the lack of feelings, beliefs, human perception, depth experience description, and resources for a bid study with a long-time frame.  This method can not show beliefs in a numerical number (Choy, 2014).

To summarize when combining the two methods of research they tend to compliment one another and eliminate a lot of the weaknesses identified, by furthermore strengthening the research when applied to the same topic and also can eliminate bias. 

“Mixed methods research involves combining the quantitative and qualitative threads into data conversion and using those results to make meta-inferences about the research question” (Rutberg, Bouikidis, 2018).