Qualitative Analysis Essay

There has been a debate over which tradition of methodology, qualitative or quantitative, can provide a better explanation while conducting social science research. Qualitative research provides in-depth case-by-case studies while quantitative, generates broader arguments accommodating a large number of cases. Many social scientists may be naturally qualitative analysts and their expertise could lie predominantly in such field (Mahoney and Goertz, 2006). Quantitative analysis, on the other hand, is preferred when the researchers want to observe common patterns among several different cases. However, both quantitative and qualitative analyses ask questions differently which may lead to different explanations, although they may be examining

The goal of qualitative research is explaining patterns and outcomes in individual cases whereas that of quantitative looks for common patterns that lead to the outcomes in large-N cases (Mahoney and Goertz, 2006). This means that qualitative research may select smaller cases to effectively explain the phenomenon being observed. As a result, the conclusions drawn from the qualitative research may apply to the cases being studied or may only provide partial explanation to what happened in some other cases. In contrast, quantitative analysis would generate broader arguments that could be commonly found in a wide variety of cases selected randomly but its arguments may not necessarily or satisfactorily explain every case in the study. Outliers and some deviations among cases may occur and by the time it happens, the quantitative model would either take out these outcasts and deviations or may add another variable to control their impact on the dependent variable. Such being the case, some patterns may be overlooked and the conclusions drawn from the quantitative analysis may not fully explain the situation for the study. Therefore, in order to generate more inclusive conclusion, these overlooks may be worth to be studied in qualitative analyses. In this way, the limitations between qualitative and quantitative analyses seem to be resolved by using both traditions