Unit 3 - Quantitative and Qualitative research

Quantitative and qualitative research 

In this blog I will be explaining the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative research and give examples relating them to the media. 

Quantitative and Qualitative research is used because any industry requires research done to find out more about a subject. This is done by creating a sufficient amount of data to have an idea on what the public thinks about their product.


Quantitative Research

Quantitative Research is research that allows people to measure and analyse data. It is a research that determines data in numerical form which is usually displayed in graphs, percentages, statics's etc.  











An advantage of Quantitative research is it can show us the popularity of a movie based on how much money the film made.For example, box office figures. This can help the Odeon (cinemas) find out more about their target audience as they are able to see the amount of money made on a film. This is reliable because it gives a better understanding with the audience as they are able to see what movie the audience like best as they are able to find out what movie people went to see at the cinemas. Nobody can be biased or change what they see because its showing us how many people paid for a specific movie. 




Another advantage of Quantitative research is it can provide estimates. In this case it can provide the estimate of the number of people reading newspapers. For example, it can show us the brand people prefer to buy based on what company were able to sell the most newspapers in an average day. This is beneficial because they are able to see what newspaper brand is sold the most within the public as they are able to see what people prefer. 


However, like everything there are disadvantages. A disadvantage of Quantitative research is that data needs to be regularly updated. This can cost a lot of money as companies would need to spend more money. For example, a T.V show would need to do test each week to find out the amount of ratings they have and compare them with previous data collected to see if the popularity of the programme is raising or not. 

Another disadvantage of Quantitative research is its not specific on who the audience is. It doesn't go deeper as we are only able to see the figures but we don't actually know is who the audience is. For example, the age, gender of the people what age group liked it best etc. 


Another disadvantage of Quantitative research is it also doesn't pinpoint exactly what made the video successful. For example, a music video. Because we would be focusing on the figures which is, how many people watched the video and the liked and disliked the video. We only see what the figures shows us but everyone who watched this music video has there own reasons on why they liked or disliked the video but we wouldn't know as we wouldn't actually know what made this video appealing to them or what they didn't like about it. 

Qualitative research 

Qualitative research is a more in-depth response from people as it allows a person to ask questions and collect more research on people they are asking. This is because they are being asked for their opinions on what they think on a certain topic. 

An advantage of Qualitative research is its easily accessible, this is useful for companies who need to access the information.They just need to go onto websites and they will able to find the Qualitative research they want. This is good especially for film companies as they can ask people whether they thought the film was any good gaining more information from them. This is because they are able to get a more in depth response on why the audience did not like the movie, what they did like, why they went to watch the movie and what they did not like. 

Another advantage of Qualitative research is it is used for more in depth research on a topic. For example, if a person was to ask someone a question about what they thought about a movie they are will receive a detailed response from asking a person a question which gives them a lot of information. This is because of the openness of the question as people are able to express their opinion. 




An advantage of Qualitative research is that there is are many different ways for people to find out the information needed due to the popularity of social media. This is because if they find the right sites they can find websites with people who are passionate about a particular subject and who will give them detailed responses on why they have liked and disliked a certain thing. For example, Youtube is popular as people can just record videos and it can be however long they want of them just talking about a particular subject. 

However there are some disadvantages to Qualitative research such as, its time consuming. This is because when asking people questions what they may have thought about a movie will take a lot of their time as they  might not be able to interview many people. This means that the researcher will not be able to find out the opinions of the most of the people they have questions for which will not enable their data to be as reliable.

Another disadvantage of Qualitative research is that its that when the question is being asked it can be quite biased as if  the researcher is putting words into the people's mouth they are asking the questions to. For example if a person asking the questions asked  'Some people think watching TV for hours is bad for you. What do you think?', this is putting words in it to the person's mouth because they are not answering the question properly like they should have and they are not asking the question  and it won't the response from the person being interviewed won't be properly.