Quantitative research sitting side by side with qualitative research.
Numbers tell us how many. People tell us what it means.
The difference between quantitative and qualitative research is actually quite simple. Quantitative research uses numbers and measurements to help us understand things like how many people are affected, how often something happens, or whether something has changed. Qualitative research looks at people's experiences — it asks what was it like, how did it affect you, and what did it mean to you? Imagine 100 people are asked about loneliness. Quantitative research might tell us that 60 of them feel lonely. Qualitative research helps us understand what loneliness actually feels like for those people and why they may feel that way. Neither approach is better — they simply answer different questions, and often we need both to understand the full picture.
As sociologist William Bruce Cameron famously wrote:
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
The quote is often wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, but the strongest evidence traces the full version to Cameron's 1963 Informal Sociology.
Perhaps the simplest way to remember it is:
Quantitative research can help us understand the numbers.
Qualitative research can help us understand the people behind them.
