An assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of Quantitative research methods.

Quantitative data is data in a numerical form- in the form of numbers. Qualitative data spans a range of material from the descriptions of social life provided by participant observation and unstructured interviews to information from written sources. Quantitative data is usually in the form of statistics. Questionnaires and structured interviews are typical methods used when gaining quantitative data, as the results are easily transferable to a numerical form. Qualitative data is associated with participant …

…more capable of the job in hand, but depending on the need for the research then each research methods purpose can increase/decrease. E.g. - to get a picture of social life - qualitative data, to get data about social life - quantitative. From my findings I have found that there are more advantages than disadvantages, although this doesn't make it 'better' against qualitative, it is merely 'better' at the specific task it performs.