The focus in quantitative research is on data that can be measured. On the other hand, qualitative research lets us know about the reactions and thoughts of the respondents concerning a particular store or product. Qualitative research is used for studying behavior patterns of different people based on case studies and sampling.
When qualitative research is used in a project, the researcher has to select a population having a specific commonality. After that, the researcher has to determine what needs to be learnt about that specific commonality. For this, a survey is conducted on the specified population. For conducting the survey, one can conduct personal interviews, send questionnaires by email to the subjects, conduct interviews on phone or ask the subjects to fill an online questionnaire.
Many a time, qualitative research is meant to find how humans respond to a particular situation. As human beings are used as the test subjects, certain important and essential steps need to be taken. The researcher will have to take the permission of the human beings who are being interviewed. The identities of all the test subjects will have to be kept confidential and the human beings who are tested need to be informed about the project details before hand.
Qualitative research can be used effectively along with quantitative data to decide on making changes in the market strategy. We can take a simple example of a convenience store. The store adopted quantitative research to find out the number of customers visiting its store weekly. On analyzing the data, it was seen that there were 70% of men and 30% women among the total customers. While the convenience store kept many products for women, there was a big difference in the percentage of women as against the men visiting the store. Now, here comes in qualitative search.
A few women from the target market who did not buy from this particular convenience store were shortlisted. These women purchased their items from other convenience stores. They were paid for being interviewed on a one-on-one basis. After interviewing all the selected women, the data was analyzed and the results were surprising. It was found that around 85% of the women interviewed said that they had been to this convenience store a couple of times but stopped after that. Some justifying reasons were given by them. Among them, there were two prominent reasons given by most of the women. One reason was that the items for men such as beer, wine and cigarettes were kept near the women’s section which made them uncomfortable. The second reason given was that the bathrooms were not clean as a result of which there was some foul smell in the sections near the bathrooms which turned them off.
Now the store owner knew the real reason behind the decline in women opting for his store. While cleaning the bathrooms and keeping the air fresh and clean was not a problem, creating an area where the men’s section where beer, wine and cigarettes was sold was a difficult proposition due to limited space. It would require some renovation to do the needful and that would cost money. So it was up to the owner to decide whether he wished to invest money in making the changes in order to attract the women customers or not.
The above example clearly illustrates the benefits of qualitative research in understanding the psyche of the target market and accordingly making changes in the market strategy.
Qualitative research is used in policy making and evaluation since it provides pointed answers to probing specific questions in a cost effective way leading to changes and results. Targets for research can be selected to suit a purpose and a researcher too has to be apt at carrying out research to elicit correct responses and not conditioned answers. The researcher too plays another important role in coding data, analyzing them and segregating them in a consistent and reliable way. This lies at the base of a company seeking to modify and improve its products to meet expectations of a larger target consumer base.
