“I’ve been arguing for years that qualitative research, focus groups and the like, are not research at all; they don’t generate data. It’s statistically insignificant, easily manipulated and, from my perspective, just as likely to be exactly wrong as exactly right.”
That is Bob Garfield from On The Media in an interview with Johann Bollen on sentiment analysis. Clearly, Mr. Garfield does not understand the purpose of qualitative research. Any textbook on scientific research methods will tell you that quantitative research focuses on the power of generalization and statistical representation, while qualitative research enables explanation, understanding, and theoretical representation. Both, however, are socially embedded practices and, therefore, can be logical or irrational, sophisticated or simple, large or small (in terms of data, scale, time, labor), as well as sloppy or rigorous.