Market Research: Qualitative, Quantitative and Everything In Between

By: Chris Hawkes
Submitted: 2007-01-17 15:15:22
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For people considering market research, a point that often trips them up is the difference between qualitative and quantitative market research. Unfortunately, there are such important distinctions between those two types of research methodologies that it’s difficult to consider the pros and cons of conducting market research until those differences are made clear. That’s the goal of this article.

I know that it’s stating the obvious, but the terms really are made much easier by remembering their root words – quantitative market research measures the quantity of respondents who feel or act in a certain way. While qualitative market research is helpful in understanding the quality of a customers’ behavior or attitudes – why do they feel or act in a certain way.

Qualitative = Quality (hows and whys or “directional”)

Quantitative = Quantity (less depth, but includes solid numbers)

Quantitative Market Research

Quantitative research is a rigid research tool that typically asks every respondent an identical set of questions, generally allowing the respondent only to select from a group of pre-defined answers. In order to provide a set of answer-categories, the team writing the research survey must have a very good understanding of the respondent’s feelings and attitudes before conducting quantitative research. However, the benefit of quantitative market research is that it’s possible to compare the preferences or satisfaction levels of groups of people to understand the inter-related factors that drive key outcomes (like brand preference). Quantitative research studies generally include far more respondents – often hundreds or thousands of respondents and are not typically done face to face. Examples of standard quantitative market research methodologies include: phone interviews, web or mail questionnaires. Quantitative studies also tend to be shorter in general because they involve an overview of a topic and less of an in-depth discussion – a typical quantitative study might take a respondent 10 or 20 minutes to complete.

Qualitative Market Research

Qualitative research is generally much less structured, and is often described as being more “exploratory” or “directional” because it seeks to reveal new attitudes or perspectives that may exist toward a topic or product category. Qualitative could be described as more freeform, often with broad questions such as “what do you like about that?” or “what would your ideal product look like?” Often questions asked of respondents in qualitative research don’t include specific answers; instead they simply prompt the respondent to answer the questions in their own words. Allowing customers to answer in their own words, without constraint or suggestions, does tend to uncover factors that may be working underneath the surface, although it also makes statistical analysis impossible. Qualitative research is often conducted face to face and typical qualitative methodologies include focus groups, in-depth-interviews or phone discussions (as opposed to more rigid questionnaires). Qualitative research often requires a greater time commitment from respondents and may last 45 minutes to a couple of hours. Qualitative research often requires an incentive to convince the respondent to participate.

There are also research projects in which both qualitative and quantitative market research methodologies are combined together. This approach allows the ability to unearth difficult to find feelings or attitudes, just beneath the surface, as well as the ability to understand the size of the different groups and conduct statistical comparisons. There is another article that describes an example of this type of approach entitled “Market Research: An Example with Qualitative and Quantitative Research”.

Article source: Expert Articles