CHAPTER 1 - LESSON 2

Importance of Quantitative Research

Across Fields

INTRODUCTlON
People do research to find solutions, even tentative ones, to problems, in order to improve or enhance ways of
doing things, to disprove or provide a new hypothesis, or simply to find answers to questions or solutions to problems
in daily life.. Research findings can affect people's lives, ways of doing things, laws, rules and regulations, as well as
policies, among others. Quantitative research, because of its emphasis on proof, rather than discovery, has been
widely used in most disciplines. .
In the natural and social sciences, quantitative research is the systematic, empirical investigation of
observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical or computational techniques. The objective of quantitative
research is to develop and employ 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 expression of quantitative relationships.
Health Sciences (Medical Technology, Dentistry, Nursing, Medicine, etc.) use quantitative research designs
like the descriptive, pre-experimental, quasi-experimental, true experiment, case study, among others.

Quantitative Research Across Disciplines

Quantitative Research and Anthropology
Bernard (1994) says that there are five steps to follow in conducting true experiments with people:
1. You need at least two groups, called the treatment group (or the intervention group or the stimulus group) and the
control group. One group gets the intervention (a new drug, for example), and the other group (the control group)
doesn't.
2. Individuals must be randomly assigned, either to the intervention group or to the control group to ensure that the
groups are equivalent. Some individuals in a population may be more religious, or more wealthy, or less sickly, or
more prejudiced than others, but random assignment ensures that those traits are randomly distributed through the
groups in an experiment. The degree to which randomization ensures equivalence, however, depends on the size
of the groups created. With random assignment, two groups of 50 are more equivalent than four groups of 25.
3. The groups are measured on one or more dependent variables (income, infant mortality, attitude toward abortion,
knowledge of curing techniques, or other things you hope to change by the intervention); this is called the pretest.
4. The intervention (the independent variable) is introduced.
5. The dependent variables are measured again. This is the posttest.

True Experiments in the Lab

Bernard further says that true experiments with people are common in laboratory experiments and in the testing of
new medicines. Laboratory experiments often produce results that beg to be tested in the natural world by
anthropologists. Aaron and Mills (1959, as cited in Bernard, 1994) demonstrated in a lab experiment that people who
go through severe initiation to a group tend to be more positive toward the group than are people who go through a
mild initiation. They reasoned that people who go through tough initiation rites put a lot of personal investment into
getting into the group. Later, if people see evidence that the group is not what they thought it would be, they are
reluctant to admit the fact because of the investment.

True Experiments in the Field

When they are done outside the lab, experiments are called field experiments. Janet Schofield and her
colleagues did a 3-year ethnographic study of a middle school. During the first year, they noticed that African-American
and white children seemed to react differently to "mildly aggressive acts"-things like bumping in the hallway, poking one
another in the classroom, asking for food, or using another student's pencil without permission. There appeared to be
no event of racial conflict in the school, but during interviews white students were more likely to report being intimidated
by their AfricanAmerican peers than vice versa (Sagar & Schofield, 1980, as cited in Bernard, 1994).

Quasi-Experiments

Quasi-experiments are most often used in evaluating social programs. Suppose a researcher has invented a
technique for improving reading comprehension among third graders. She/he selects two third-grade classes in a
school district. One of them gets the intervention and the other doesn't. Students are measured before and after the
intervention to see whether their reading scores improve. This design contains many of the elements of a true
experiment, but the participants are not assigned randomly to the treatment and control groups. (Bernard, 1994).

The One-Shot Case Study, or One-Group Posttest Only Design

In the one-shot case study design, a single group of individuals is measured on some dependent variable after
an intervention has taken place. The researcher tries to evaluate the experiment by interviewing people (0) and trying
to assess the impact of the intervention (X). The problem, of course, is that you can't be sure that what you observe is
the result of some particular intervention. In the 1950s, physicians began general use of the Pap Test, a simple
procedure for determining the presence of cervical cancer. Following the introduction of the Pap Test, measurements
were made for several years to see if there was any effect. Sure enough, cervical cancer rates dropped and dropped.
Later, it was noticed that cervical cancer rates had been dropping steadily since the 1930s. Of course, early detection
of any cancer is important in fighting the disease. But the data froin the 1930s and 1940s show that, initially at least,
the Pap Test was not responsible for lower rates of cervical cancer (Williams, 1978, as cited in Bernard, 1994).

The Two-Group Posttest Only Design

For this research design, Bernard (1994) cites this example: Consider two villages in the same cultural region;
one village has experienced a major intervention (tourism, a factory, an irrigation system) while the other villages have
not. You measure a series of variables (income, attitudes toward the national government, the amount of time women
spend in child-rearing activities) in both villages. These are 01 and 02.
If the differences between 01 and 02 are small, you can't tell if the intervention, X, caused those differences. This
design is quite convincing , though, when the differences between 01 and 02 are large and where you have lots of
participant observation data to back up the claim that the intervention is responsible for those differences.

The One-Group Pretest-Posttest Design

In the one-group pretest-posttest design, some variables are measured (observed), then the intervention takes
place, and then the variables are measured again. This takes care of some of the problems associated with the one-
shot case study, but doesn't eliminate the threats of history, testing, maturation, selection, and mortality. Most
importantly, if there is a significant difference in the pretest and posttest measurements, we can't tell if the intervention
made that difference happen. (Bernard, 1994).

Quantitative Research and Communication

Researchers are often interested in how an understanding of a particular communication phenomenon might
be generalized to a larger population. For example, researchers can advance questions like "What effect do punitive
behavioral control statements have on a classroom? What communicative behaviors are associated with different
stages in a romantic relationship? What communicative behaviors are used to respond to co-workers displaying
emotional stress? (Allen, Titsworth, Hunt, 2009).

Quantitative Research and Sports Medicine

A quantitative research done by the University of Eastern Finland investigated the relationship between the
mushrooming of fast food chains and obesity of children, as well as the intervention needed to prevent the children's
obesity from reaching serious proportions.
The research studied 410 children, with ages ranging from six to eight years old from Kuopio, Eastern Finland.
The researchers focused on the children's physical activity and physical inactivity and the concomitant impact
on the children's amount of adipose tissue (fat mass) and endurance fitness. The study showed that children who did
strenuous exercise for 10 minutes daily had 26-30% less adipose tissue than their peers who were physically inactive.
It had also been found out that even light physical activity for the equivalent time of passive sitting reduced the
children's adipose tissue by 13%. The study concluded that physical activity affects effectively the children's weight
control.

Quantitative Research and Medical Education

Quantitative research in medical education tends to be predominantly observational research based on
surveys or correlational studies. (http.//oxfordmedicine.com/ view/ 10.1093/med/9780199652679.001.0001/med
9780199652679 chapter53.)
 Experimental research designs may enhance the quality of medical education. Said designs test interventions
like curriculum, teaching-learning process, or assessment with an experimental group. Either a comparison or
controlled group of learners may allow researchers to overcome validity concerns and infer potential cause-effect
generalizations.
When designing their own or evaluating other researchers' studies, researchers must always keep in mind
internal and external validity concerns.
The selection of a research design for any study should be within the parameters of the research questions as
stated in the problem statement or hypothesis. In quantitative research, the findings will reflect the reliability and validity
(psychometric characteristics of the measured outcomes or dependent variables such as changes in knowledge, skill or
attitudes used to assess the effectiveness of medical education intervention or the independent variable of interest.

Quantitative Research and the Behavioral Sciences

Contemporary quantitative scholars are interested in two types of questions:
1. Questions of relationships and
2. Questions of differences

Relationship questions tend to explore how one behavior exhibited by people is related to other types of
behavior. Examples are verbally aggressive behaviors related to physical aggression-that is, when a person has high
level of verbally aggressive behavior, does he or she tend to be physically aggressive? Are certain supervisor
communication skills related to the emotional experiences of employees?
Questions of difference explore how patterns of behavior or perceptions might differ from one group or type of
person to another: Do people with disabilities experience emotional labor differently from those without disabilities? Do
women perceive talkativeness (or lack of it) differently from men? Do communication styles differ from one culture to
the next? (Allen, Titsworth, Hunt, 2009).
When quantitative researchers explore questions of differences or questions of relationships, they do so in an
attempt to uncover certain patterns of behavior. If the researcher discovers that a certain relationship exists in a sample
that she or he has drawn from the population, she/he is then in a position to draw generalizations about patterns
expected of human behavior.

Quantitative Research in Education and Psychology

Mertens (2005) says that the dominant paradigms that guided early educational and psychological research
were positivism and its successor, post positivism. Positivism is based on the rationalistic, empiricist philosophy that
originated with Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Locke, August Comte, and Immanuel Kant. The underlying assumptions
of positivism include the belief that the social world can be studied in the same way as the natural world, that there is a
method for studying the social world that is value-free, and that explanations of a causal nature can be provided.
The following table was done by Doren, Bullis, and Benz, 1996, as cited in Mertens, 2005, to illustrate this
view of positivism:
Research Problem: Very little is known about the victimization experiences of adolescents with disabilities,
yet previous research has suggested that people with mental retardation are vulnerable to economic,
psychological, and physical abuse.

Research Question: What are the- predictors of victimization for a sample of adolescents with disabilities in
transition from high school to adult life?

Method: Students with disabilities and their parents in two western states were interviewed during the
students' last year in school and once again, when students were 1 year out of school.

Participants: Participants were students with disabilities who were identified by their school as in their last
year of high school or who had dropped out of high school sometime during what would have been their last
year (sample size=422).

Instruments and Procedures: A fixed- response interview was conducted by telephone with students and
their parents by trained interviewers. Predictor variables were selected based on previous research; these
included gender, minority status, serious emotional disturbance (SED), specific learning disability (SLD),
dropout status, family socioeconomic status, parent rating of academic skills, and a rating of personal-social
skills. The outcome variable of victimization was defined as experiencing more than one of the following: being
teased or bothered, having something stolen from them, or being hit hard or beaten up.
 Results,: The following characteristics were associated with a greater likelihood of being victimized during the
first year out of school: prior victimization while still in school in the previous year, being female, having low
post school personalsocial achievement, and having both SED and an arrest record within 1 year of leaving
school.

Discussion: The greatest risk for victimization was for the group who had serious emotional disturbance and
low personal-social achievement. The authors recommend increasing social skill training directed to this
specific group in terms of appropriate ways to behave in community settings where victimization could occur.

Quantitative Research and the Social Sciences

Quantitative approaches are typically associated with positivist perspectives in social research. Hammersley
(1993, as cited in Henn, Weinstein, Foard, 2006) provides a useful definition of this approach:
The term `quantitative method refers to the adoption of the natural science experiments as the model for
scientific research, its key features being quantitative measurement of the phenomena studied and systematic control
of the theoretical variables influencing those problems.

Thus, the logic of such research is to:

 collect data using standardized approaches on a range of variables;
 search for patterns of causal relationships between these variables; and
 test given theory by confirming or denying precise hypotheses.

The methods employed in this type of quantitative social research are most typically the sample survey and the
experiment, a method that is particularly popular in psychological research.
The sample survey is the most commonly used technique for gathering information, whether by quantitative or
qualitative means. Surveys are based on using statistical sampling methods. By taking a representative sample from a
given population and applying a standardized research instrument in the form of a structured questionnaire, surveys
enable descriptive and explanatory generalizations to be made about the population in question.

Experimental Research

Experiments are most commonly used in psychological research and in the broad field of business studies in the form
of action research. Experimental research is based on the researcher manipulating certain conditions in order to
identify the relationship between particular variables, in the hope that it will explain cause and effect relationships. In
seeking to measure the impact that one factor has on another by controlling all other factors that might have an effect,
experimental research builds on the principles of a positivist approach to science, more than any other research
technique.
Experiments can be carried out in a laboratory or a field setting. Laboratory experimentation is the most closely
regulated method of experiment, involving the introduction of certain conditions into a controlled environment that
stimulates key characteristics of a natural environment. An example might be examining the extent to which the
responses of a group of voters to questions about political attitudes after exposures to a series of party election
broadcast might be different to another (yet identical) group's responses who are not confronted with such images.
Such experiments allow for very considerable time on behalf of the researcher who is able to effect change and
observe the research participants' subsequent behaviour.
Social research is all around us: Educators, government officials, business, managers, human service providers and
health care professionals regularly use social research methods and findings. People use social research to raise
children, reduce crime, improve public health, sell products or just understand one's life. (Neuman, 2007).