Quantitative and qualitative research in education

By documentation and content analysis, this paper examines the basic characteristics of quantitative and qualitative research paradigms used in education. This report also briefly presents a comparison between two of these paradigms in terms of assumption, purpose, approach, research role, procedure and data collection methods.
Nội dung trích xuất từ tài liệu:
Quantitative and qualitative research in education JOURNAL OF SCIENCE OF HNUE 2011, Vol. 56, N◦ . 1, pp. 149-156QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN EDUCATION Pham Thi Ben Hanoi National University of Education E-mail: phamben2002@gmail.com Abstract. By documentation and content analysis, this paper examines the basic characteristics of quantitative and qualitative research paradigms used in education. This report also briefly presents a comparison between two of these paradigms in terms of assumption, purpose, approach, research role, procedure and data collection methods. Keywords: Quantitative, qualitative, educational research methods1. Introduction Although education is called applied science [3;69], the paradigms used andthe aims of research in education are the same as those of research in science gen-erally. There are five objectives of educational research: exploration which is donewhen researchers are trying to generate ideas about something; description is doneto describe the characteristics of something or some phenomenon; explanation toshow how and why a phenomenon operates as it does; prediction objective accu-rate predictions and the last objective is influence which involves the application ofresearch results to impact the world to demonstrate [1]. Moreover, education is a practical activity. The purpose of which is to changethose being educated in some desirable ways so that educational research can simplytransform educational problems into a series of theoretical problems which seriouslydistorts the purpose of the whole enterprise. There are three currently major re-search paradigms in education (and in the social and behavioral sciences): quanti-tative, qualitative, and mixed research [1]. This report focuses on two paradigms ineducation which are discussed widely in the literature and have roots in 20th-centuryphilosophical thinking [4;1]: quantitative and qualitative paradigms. Qualitative and quantitative so-called polar opposites paradigms [2] have philo-sophical roots in the naturalistic and the positivistic philosophies, respectively.Qualitative research approaches reflect some sort of individual phenomelogical per-spective while quantitative tend to emphasise that there is a common reality onwhich people can agree. Qualitative research compares the characteristics of one 149 Pham Thi Beneducational entity with those of another entity, with no concern for amounts orfrequencies of the characteristics being studied [6;5]. Quantitative research, on theother hand, compares the amounts or frequencies of the characteristics that arebeing investigated. Both quantitative and qualitative paradigms are used in educa-tion research to investigate, explore and in the end to sum up with the findings toincrease the educational quality and science.2. Content2.1. Quantitative research in education Quantitative is termed the traditional, the positivist, the experimental, or theempiricist paradigm. The quantitative thinking comes from an empiricist tradi-tion established by such authorities as Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Newton, and Locke[4]. Quantitative paradigm is an inquiry into a social or human problem, basedon testing a theory composed of variables, measured with numbers, and analyzedwith statistical procedures, in order to determine whether the predictive generaliza-tions of theory hold true [7;2]. Quantitative research is consistent with quantitativepapradigm and it accumulates data that is usually reducible to numerical form orcan be subject to statistical testing. Therefore, mathematics and more specificallystatistics play an important part in the shaping of quantitative view of science. Thewords or behaviour patterns or documents are always interpreted through quantita-tive or statistical analysis to their mathematical significance as apposed to patternsof meaning which emerge from data collection which are presented in the partici-pants own words in qualitative paradigm. By using this paradigm in both natural and social sciences, the disciplineof statistics and philosophy of numbers have gradual development and lead to bemulti-faced and obscured. In the 19th century, quantitative methods have beenthe favoured choice, methodological imperative. At the end of 19th century thesemethods have been increasingly refined by more and more complex types of statisticsand they have been adapted to computer technology [8;4]. During the 1940s and1950s, the quantitative paradigm dominated the social science and the educationalresearch scene [2;5]. These mathematical significances of quantitative paradigm ineducation ...