Qualitative Research is primarily exploratory research that is used to gain a rich understanding experiences, understandings, motivations, or opinions. There are various types of qualitative research, and methods tend to vary, usually being less structured than their qualitative counterparts. For the most part, qualitative research is divided into five different types/approaches: Narrative, Phenomenology, Case Study, Grounded Theory, and Ethnography.
What is the difference between Qualitative and Quantitative Research?
Unlike qualitative research, which tends to focus on studying opinions, motivations, experiences, understandings, etc., quantitative research attempts to produce numerical data or data that can be transformed into useful statistics. Furthermore, quantitative research tries to reach generalizable conclusions about the group(s) being studied. Quantitative research also employs much more structured methods of data gathering and analysis than qualitative methods.