There may be times your assignment specifically asks you to find quantitative and/or qualitative research articles. It's important to understand the difference between the two before starting your search. Knowing these basics will help you identify the correct type of articles during your searching.

Qualitative research is based upon data that is gathered by observation. Qualitative research articles will attempt to answer questions that cannot be measured by numbers but rather by perceived meaning. Qualitative research methods include phenomenology, ethnography, grounded theory, and historical. Focus groups, observation, interviews, and case studies are several ways that data might be collected for qualitative research.

Quantitative research attempts to answer research questions through the quantification of data. There are four main types of quantitative research design: experimental, quasi-experimental, descriptive or correlational.  Quantitative approaches include randomized controlled trials, cohort studies, non-randomized trials, case-control studies, cross-sectional surveys and case reports.

• Use "qualitative" or "quantitative" as a search term. For example:
  • diabetes AND qualitative
  • postpartum depression AND quantitative
• Try adding a particular research methodology as a search term.  For example:
  • dieting AND questionnaire
  • marijuana AND focus group
• Look for articles tagged with subjects that indicate what type of research was done. Quantitative research requires numerical data, so this gives us a big clue that the articles tagged with the word “data analysis software" report the results of quantitative research. Look for subjects like "thematic analysis" or "interviewing" tagged on qualitative articles.

How do you know for sure what type of article you have found?

• It's best to read the abstract of an article and not decide if an article fits your need on just the title. You can click on the title of the article to read to find the article abstract.
• The “Methods” or "Methodology" section of the full-text article will tell you exactly what kind of study was completed. Be careful of articles that used mixed-methods, which is a combination of qualitative and quantitative. Your assignment may want an article that used one or the other.