Encyclopedia > Quantitative psychological research
Quantitative psychological research is psychological research which performs statistical estimation or statistical inference. This definition distinguishes it from so-called qualitative psychological research; however, many psychologists do not acknowledge any real difference between quantitative and qualitative research. The validity of the distinction is discussed in the article about qualitative psychological research.
If qualitative research has some goal other than estimating parameters or testing, the important issue is what that goal is. Qualitative psychologicalresearchers have described other characteristics of qualitative research which they believe also distinguish it from so-called quantitativepsychologicalresearch.
However, quantitativeresearch may also refrain from generalizing to the population (in educational research for example, the ability to generalize is often extremely limited, and studies often restrict themselves to drawing conclusions about the sample studied).
Quantitativepsychologicalresearchers often incorporate large numbers of independent variables in multiple linear regression studies, so establishing this claim empirically might be difficult.
Quantitativeresearch is the systematic scientific investigation of quantitative properties and phenomena and their relationships.
Quantitativeresearch is widely used in both the natural and social sciences, including physics, biology, psychology, sociology, geology, education, and journalism.
In the social sciences particularly, quantitativeresearch is often contrasted with qualitative research, which is the examination, analysis and interpretation of observations for the purpose of discovering underlying meanings and patterns of relationships, including classifications of types of phenomena and entities, in a manner that does not involve mathematical models.
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