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This definition, however, is entirely negative, describing qualitative research by what it lacks rather than by what it possesses. Absence of a characteristic is not itself a defining characteristic — journalism, for example, does not estimate parameters or test null hypotheses, but one would scarcely claim that it is a form of psychological research. If qualitative research has some goal other than estimating parameters or testing, the important issue is what that goal is. Qualitative psychological researchers have described other characteristics of qualitative research which they believe also distinguish it from so-called quantitative psychological research.
To many researchers the goal of qualitative psychological research is to develop hypotheses or theory. The crucial question here is the definitions of hypothesis or theory. If what is meant are hypotheses or theories which can be tested by quantitative statistical methods, then the definition is operational and objective. However, it is not universally accepted. Many practitioners reject quantitative methods outright. Other goals have therefore been proposed for qualitative research.
For example, qualitative research is often said to be naturalistic. That is, its goal is to understand behaviour in a natural setting. However, quantitative research models and techniques may be used for the same purpose.
Two other goals attributed to qualitative research are understanding a phenomenon from the perspective of the research participant and understanding the meanings people give to their experience. Again, however, quantitative research may be conducted for the same purposes.
Qualitative research is sometimes said to have as its goal the understanding of the sample studied, rather than generalizing from the sample to the population. However, quantitative research may also refrain from generalizing to the population (in educational research for example, the ability to generalize is often extremely limited, and studies often restrict themselves to drawing conclusions about the sample studied). Furthermore, this goal does not account for the renunciation of statistical analysis, which helps researchers to understand samples.
Giving voice to marginalized groups and interpreting historically or culturally significant events are two other goals attributed to qualitative research which do not distinguish it from quantitative research and to which statistical analysis is relevant.
Other descriptions which may be taken as descriptions of the goals of qualitative psychological research tend to stipulate that the research should be carried out in a certain way. That is, in these definitions qualitative research is not defined by its results (that is, functionally) but by its procedures (that is, causally).
Qualitative psychological research is often said to be inductive. This seems to mean that the research is non-evaluative rather than that it depends on inductive logic in the usual sense. However, a reasonable argument could be made that quantitative research is often non-evaluative in the same sense.
Qualitative psychological research emphasizes fieldwork, and this emphasis has been offered as a distinguishing mark. However, quantitative researchers also do fieldwork.
Qualitative psychological research is also described as holistic. That is, qualitative researchers believe in studying phenomena in their entirety rather than concentrating on narrow aspects of the phenomena defined as independent or dependent variableIn experimental design, a dependent variable is a variable whose values in different treatment conditions are compared. For example, in a study of how different dosages of a drug are related to the severity of symptoms of a disease, a measure of the severs. However, this assertion is questionable. Karl PopperKarl Raimund Popper ( July 28, 1902 September 17, 1994), was an Austrian-born, British philosopher of science. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philoso has argued that we cannot know that we are studying the totality of any phenomenon and that consequently we cannot study phenomena holistically. Certainly qualitative researchers have provided few examples of research which attempts to study a phenomenon exhaustively. For one thing, conducting such research would require an ability which no one has, specifically the knowledge of enough disciplines to conduct such research. For example, qualitative researchers do not necessarily assess the medical conditions of human participants, but those medical conditions may easily influence their behaviour.
Other proposed distinctions between qualitative and "quantitative" (that is, statistically-based) psychological research are also questionable – that qualitative research is more intense, for example, that in qualitative research the researcher is the primary collector and analyst of data, that qualitative research is "richly descriptive" (statistical analysis which can position a phenomenon accurately within a distribution certainly has some claim to be considered richly descriptive), or that quantitative researchers assume that researchers do not influence their data (the influence of the experimenter on participants is an important research topic in quantitative psychology, as is the influence of test administrators on test-takers).
Qualitative psychological research is often treated as the opposite of quantitative research. Qualitative analysis, however, is at the very least still descriptive research, and relevant quantitative psychometricPsychometrics is the science of measuring "psychological" aspects of a person such as knowledge, skills, abilities, or personality. Measurement of these unobservable phenomena is difficult and much of the research and accumulated art of this discipline is concerns such as its reliability and validity are critical to its utility.
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