Questions 160

Professors Comments

Outstanding work on your comparison of literature reviews. Here is a table of research designs and descriptions to help you as you move forward with your study.

Per GCU policy, 10% was taken off for being turned in a day late.

Types of Research Designs

Quantitative Designs

Qualitative Designs

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Literature Review

In doing research, both quantitative and qualitative methods are normally used in equal measure, and the one chosen is mainly dependent on the primary aim of the researcher. A critical part of a research process is compiling a literature review whose main objective is to identify a gap while also examining the extent of recent and previous studies tangential to the research problem (Creswell, 2014). Quantitative methodologies are mainly used when the research exercise has numerous numerical variables while qualitative methodologies are used with language-based variables. This difference is also depicted when compiling the literature. The difference between the two structures is addressed in the following section.

In qualitative literature review, the researcher normally gathers a set of data, studies and summarizes the information in a narrative fashion. A researcher is normally looking for information previous researchers were stating, as opposed to what they had found. Researchers inform readers in descriptions and words, as opposed to doing it mathematically (Creswell, 2014). It is seen that qualitative research aims at informing the reader about the association of variables, and reasons behind the occurrence. In compiling this type of a literature review, a researcher must be able to interpret the findings of previous researchers, while relating the information to their research problem. Additionally, when interpreting previous findings, a researcher is able to narrow down to a basis that can relate to the research problem in a fashion that allows them to identify gaps in the field. Essentially, it is seen that a qualitative literature review mainly revolves around interpreting previous findings using language rather than mathematically in a manner that allows readers to comprehend the research gap in the field.

On the other hand, quantitative literature reviews mainly discuss deducing from a huge body of knowledge in a fashion that allows researchers to clearly state, and measure their hypothesis, and the research questions. When compiling this type of research, a researcher has plenty of studies and findings to draw conclusions from to carry out a meta-analysis. It refers to taking the statistics reported in each study and comparing them, and eventually being able to convert them into a common statistic (Mackay, 2007). The deduced values are averaged to examine what is stated about the research problem, and the entire research project. Essentially, it can be seen this type of literature review mainly focuses on making deductions from available statistics reported by previous studies.

Conclusion

From the above definitions, the two types of literature reviews suffer from major limitations. For qualitative literature reviews, when interpreting findings from previous studies, sampling biases are likely to occur. Biases stem from subjectivity ad imprecision, based on the researcher’s responsibility with interpreting data. On the other hand, in quantitative literature reviews, a researcher is likely to average and present outdated and irrelevant data. Though researchers tend to examine recent studies, there are fields and areas that have not fully been exploited in terms of empirical research. When such happens, there are limited research studies exploited in deducing and formulating a hypothesis.

Reference

Creswell, J. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed method approaches (4th ed.). Stanford, CA: SAGE Publications.

Mackay, G. (2007). Is there a need to Differentiate between Qualitative and Quantitative Searching Strategies for Literature Reviewing? Qualitative Social Work 6(2), 231-241.