by Temujin

Now, the quantitative/qualitative aspect of psychology is probably something that the layman has little awareness of. Fortunately, you are about to be enlightened.

In ye olde days, all psychology was quantitative. You'd make a rigorous experiment as objectively as possible, carefully measure something, such as reaction times, tick the right boxes, plot a nice graph and work out that weight is proportional to pies eaten, or such-like.

However, an ever increasing amount of research is qualitative. Qualitative research doesn't have methods that are as rigid as quantitative, and it tends to be less theory-driven (grounded theory involves no prior research at all. You just do your study, get your results, and then analyse them, thus avoiding prejudicing your interpretation by having read previous findings.) The information gathered tends to be less discrete and more continuous (eg text rather than numbers) and it is certainly useful in ways that quantitative data can't be.

I tend to prefer quantitative research. Yes, it isn't objective completely as they claim, however, it does contain a clear procedure so you can be sure what the psychologists have done, unlike qualitative. In addition, whilst the interpretation is open to dispute, the raw data is in nice little numbered boxes so others can view it and make up their own mind. Because qualitative data is often reams and reams of text, the full lot is almost never published, so for you don't know how something you haven't seen was analysed, which irritates me.

Another thing I dislike about qualitative is this idea of oppressive positivism. This is a nasty little phrase bandied about by persons who consider that quantitative research reduces people to the level of numbers because that's how data is very often measured. I do not believe that is the case, the numbers are used (as in a 1-5 Likert scale) simply to make analysis and data collection more explicit and replicable, unlike the thousand shades of grey that surround qualitative.