Qualitative and Quantitative research


There are numerous differences between qualitative and quantitative measurement.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative Research options have been predetermined and a large number of respondents are
involved. By definition, measurement must be objective, quantitative and statistically valid.
Simply put, it’s about numbers, objective hard data. The sample size for a survey is calculated by
statisticians using formulas to determine how large a sample size will be needed from a given
population in order to achieve findings with an acceptable degree of accuracy. Generally,
researchers seek sample sizes which yield findings with at least a 95% confidence interval
(which means that if you repeat the survey 100 times, 95 times out of a hundred, you would get
the same response), plus/minus a margin error of 5 percentage points. Many surveys are designed
to produce a smaller margin of error.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research is collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data by observing what people do
and say. Whereas, quantitative research refers to counts and measures of things, qualitative
research refers to the meanings, concepts, definitions, characteristics, metaphors, symbols, and
descriptions of things.
Qualitative research is much more subjective than quantitative research and uses very different
methods of collecting information, mainly individual, in-depth interviews and focus groups. The
nature of this type of research is exploratory and open-ended. Small numbers of people are
interviewed in-depth and/or a relatively small number of focus groups are conducted.
Participants are asked to respond to general questions and the interviewer or group moderator
probes and explores their responses to identify and define people’s perceptions, opinions and
feelings about the topic or idea being discussed and to determine the degree of agreement that
exists in the group. The quality of the finding from qualitative research is directly dependent
upon the skills, experience and sensitive of the interviewer or group moderator.
This type of research is often less costly than surveys and is extremely effective in acquiring
information about people’s communications needs and their responses to and views about
specific communications.

Basically, quantitative research is objective; qualitative is subjective. Quantitative research
seeks explanatory laws; qualitative research aims at in-depth description. Qualitative research
measures what it assumes to be a static reality in hopes of developing universal laws. Qualitative
research is an exploration of what is assumed to be a dynamic reality. It does not claim that what
is discovered in the process is universal, and thus, replicable. Common differences usually cited
between these types of research include.

The intellectual strands of cultural studies

The concepts we have explored are drawn from a range of theoretical and methodological paradigms. The most influential theories within cultural studies have been: Marxism, culturalism, structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and the politics of difference (under which heading, for the sake of convenience, I include feminism, theories of race, ethnicity and postcolonialism). The purpose of sketching the basic tenets of these theoretical domains is to provide a signpost to thinking in the field. However, each is developed in more detail throughout the text and there is no one place in the book to look for theory. Theory permeates all levels of cultural studies and needs to be connected to specific issues and debates rather than explored solely in the abstract.
Marxism and the centrality of class
Marxism is, above all, a form of historical materialism. It stresses the historical specificity of human affairs and the changeable character of social formations whose core features are located in the material conditions of existence. Marx (1961) argued that the first priority of human beings is the production of their means of subsistence through labour. As humans produce food, clothes and all manner of tools with which to shape their environment, so they also create themselves. Thus labour, and the forms of social organization
that material production takes, a mode of production, are central categories of Marxism. The organization of a mode of production is not simply a matter of co-ordinating objects; rather, it is inherently tied up with relations between people. These relationships, while social, that is, co-operative and co-ordinated, are also matters of power and conflict. Indeed, Marxists regard social antagonisms as being the motor of historical
change. Further, given the priority accorded to production, other aspects of human relations –consciousness, culture and politics – are said to be structured by economic relations. 
For Marxism, history is not a smooth evolutionary process. Rather, it is marked by significant breaks and discontinuities of modes of production. Thus, Marx discusses the transformations from an ancient mode of production to a feudal mode of production and thence to the capitalist mode of production. Different forms of material organization and different social relations characterize each mode of production. Further, each mode of production is superseded by another as internal contradictions, particularly those of class conflict, lead to its transformation and replacement.
Capitalism
The centrepiece of Marx’s work was an analysis of the dynamics of capitalism. This is a mode of production premised on the private ownership of the means of production (in his day, factories, mills, workshops; and in a more contemporary vein, multinational corporations). The fundamental class division of capitalism is between those who own the means of production, the bourgeoisie, and those who, being a propertyless proletariat, must sell their labour to survive. The legal framework and common-sense thinking of capitalist societies declare that the worker is a free agent and the sale of labour a free and fair contract. However, Marx argues that this appearance covers over a fundamental exploitation at work. Capitalism aims to
make a profit and does so by extracting surplus value from workers. That is, the value of the labour taken to produce a product, which becomes the property of the bourgeoisie, is less than the worker receives for it.
The realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of goods (which have both ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’) as commodities. A commodity is something available to be sold in the marketplace. Thus, commodification is the process associated with capitalism by which objects, qualities and signs are turned into commodities. The surface appearance of goods sold in the marketplace obscures the origins of those commodities in an exploitative relationship, a process Marx calls commodity fetishism.
Further, the fact that workers are faced with the products of their own labour now separated from them constitutes alienation. Since the proletariat are alienated from the core of human activity, namely the labour process, so they are also alienated from themselves. Capitalism is a dynamic system whose profit-driven mechanisms lead to the continual revolutionizing of the means of production and the forging of new markets. For Marx, this was its great merit in relation to feudalism. This is because it heralded a massive expansion in
the productive capacities of European societies. It dragged them into the modern world of railways, mass production, cities and a formally equitable and free set of human relations in which people were not, in a legal sense, the property of others (as were serfs in feudal societies). However, the mechanisms of capitalism also give rise to perennial crises and will ultimately lead, or so Marx argued, to its being superseded by socialism. Problems for capitalism include:
  •  a falling rate of profit;
  •  cycles of boom and bust;
  • an increasing monopoly;
  •  the creation of a proletariat which is set to become the system’s grave-digger.
Marx hoped that capitalism would be rent asunder by class conflict. He envisaged the proletariat’s organizations of defence, trade unions and political parties, overthrowing and replacing it with a mode of production based on communal ownership, equitable distribution and ultimately the end of class division.
Marxism and cultural studies
Cultural studies writers have had a long, ambiguous, but productive relationship with Marxism. Cultural studies is not a Marxist domain, but has drawn succour from it while subjecting it to vigorous critique. There is little doubt that we live in social formations organized along capitalist lines that manifest deep class divisions in work, wages, housing, education and health. Further, cultural practices are commodified by large corporate culture industries. In that context cultural studies has been partisan in taking up the cause of change. However, Marxism has been critiqued for its apparent teleology. That is, the positing of an inevitable point to which history is moving, namely the demise of capitalism and the arrival of a classless society. This is a problem on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Theoretically, a determinist reading of Marxism robs human beings of agency or the capacity to act. This is so because the outcomes of human action appear to be predetermined by metaphysical laws (ironically posing as objective science) that drive history from outside of human action. It is a problem on empirical grounds because of the failure of significant numbers of proletarian revolutions to materialize, and the oppressive totalitarian outcomes of those that made claims to be such revolutions. In its engagement with Marxism, cultural studies has been particularly concerned with
issues of structure and action. On the one hand, Marxism suggests that there are regularities or structures to human existence that lie outside of any given individual. On the other hand, it has a commitment to change through human agency. Cultural studies has resisted the economic determinism inherent in some readings of
Marxism and has asserted the specificity of culture. Cultural studies has also been concerned with the apparent success of capitalism – that is, not merely its survival but its transformation and expansion. This has been attributed in part to the winning of consent for capitalism on the level of culture. Hence the interest in questions of culture, ideology and hegemony which were commonly pursued through perspectives dubbed culturalism and structuralism.

Disciplining cultural studies


Many cultural studies practitioners oppose forging disciplinary boundaries for the field.  However, it is hard to see how this can be resisted if cultural studies wants to survive by attracting degree students and funding (as opposed to being only a postgraduate research activity). In that context, Bennett (1998) offers his ‘element of a definition’ of cultural studies:
  • Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field in which perspectives from different disciplines can be selectively drawn on to examine the relations of culture and power.
  • The forms of power that cultural studies explores are diverse and include gender, race, class, colonialism, etc. Cultural studies seeks to explore the connections between these forms of power and to develop ways of thinking about culture and power that can be utilized by agents in the pursuit of change.
  • The prime institutional sites for cultural studies are those of higher education, and as such, cultural studies is like other academic disciplines. Nevertheless, it tries to forge connections outside of the academy with social and political movements, workers in cultural institutions, and cultural management.
With this in mind, we may consider the kinds of concepts and concerns that regulate 
cultural studies as a discursive formation or language-game. Each of the concepts intro-duced here is developed at greater length throughout the book and can also be referred 
to in the Glossary.
Genesis of cultural studies 
This stream of research has appeared in Britain in the 1960s in Birmingham, in 1964, Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (en) (CCCS). Besides its founder, usually associated with this stream: Stuart Hall (successor of Richard Hoggart head of CCCS), Charlotte Brunsdon, Phil Cohen, Angela McRobbie, David Morley, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams.
In the 1970s, cultural studies are introduced to the United States where they are related to the French Theory, term used to describe the work of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.
Since the 1990s, cultural studies internationalize. Many currents appear in Europe: Kulturwissenschaft (de) in Germany, the cultural analysis (in) the Netherlands, etc.

Jean-Claude Passeron is one of the first to introduce cultural studies work in France has contributed to the translation and wrote the preface of the book culture of the poor (The Uses of Literacy) by Richard Hoggart .dropoff window But it was recently that cultural studies are beginning to take off in France, despite the appropriation of French Theory by American cultural studies.