Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when. Smaller but focused samples are more often needed than large samples.
In the conventional view, qualitative methods produce information only on the particular cases studied, and any more general conclusions are only propositions. So if you wanted to investigate human behaviour, you could conduct case studies of a random group of people and survey them using observation, a questionnaire or an interview. Qualitative research asks broad questions and collects word data from participants. The researcher looks for themes and describes the information in themes and patterns exclusive to that set of participants.
Quantitative research is a systematic empirical investigation of social phenomena using statistical, mathematical or computational methods. The objective of quantitative research is to develop and use mathematical models, theories and/or hypotheses pertaining to phenomena. The process of measurement is central to quantitative research because it provides the fundamental connection between empirical observation and mathematical relationships. Quantitative data is any data that is in numerical form such as statistics, percentages, etc. The quantitative researcher asks a specific, narrow question and collects numerical data from participants to answer the question. The researcher analyzes the data with the help of statistics. The researcher is hoping the numbers will yield an unbiased result that can be generalized to some larger population.
