Be aware of your own research views

Hello, everyone. In the last section, we have talked about the differences between the quantitative and qualitative research approaches. So I think you can have a better understanding about that. And the third section we would like to cover about how to choose your research method. With those techniques in mind, so it’s your turn. You should determine what kind of research method you need to use prior to conducting any of the research. And here’s some tips for you. The first one, we can get to understand what to use from those review of the literature. For example, what approaches have been used before? Are they appropriate? Is there any sufficient literature to define the theoretical framework or hypothesis?

If yes, that’s okay for you to use quantitative research. Otherwise you may consider to develop a new one by your own. You can also try to choose the research method by your research purposes. For example, is a research purpose causal or merely descriptive or is like exploratory in nature. So keep that in mind. Also, when choose your research method, try to consider your audience. When you are doing a research consulting project, your audience should be your clients. If you are trying to write up a paper for the journal, you should consider the readers for that particular journal. Do they prefer the qualitative research or the quantitative one?

In addition, the data and time availability or access is also an important factor to influence your decision. Do you have enough time or labor to conduct those kind of research? Do you have the access to approach those respondents, and where to get them? As a qualitative researcher, you also need to have the following skills. For example, you should have good social and communication skills, which means you should be able to listen and converse with the respondents, and to be able to communicate findings. A good short-term memory and speed of response can help you get rich information from the respondents. You should have a flexible and analytical mind to help you to general those findings during those data collection process.

You should have a good recognition of the patterns,or any concepts, theories from your findings that requires a good conceptual ability. Also you should be a detail oriented person. Eye for detail is very important for conducting any qualitative research. For example, those tones, eye contact or even the facial expression can be very important to our research. Data interpretation and presentation skills are also very important for qualitative researchers to disseminate their findings to the public, so does the ability to cope with uncertainty. Imagine that those qualitative research, most of them are unstructured or semi-structured. So, we don’t have particular expectations prior to any of the research. In that case, we should keep open minded.

We should be able to cope with those uncertainties and try to conceptualize them as soon as possible, and get your own model or your own theories. Meanwhile, as a quantitative researcher, you need to have the following skills. You should be able to conduct those data analysis, which means you should have a good skill to do that. You should be a well-organized person. You should feel comfortable with all those statistics, modeling, computer programming, etc. And you should have a good written and oral communication skills. Those quantitative research are really investigative in nature.

Project management and communication skills are also very important. Imagine if you would like to conduct the large survey with the different respondents, you should organize your team and have different process, to get the data collected, get permission from each of the respondents. So that’s a huge task. You also need to have an eye for details, especially in analyzing those data. Data interpretation and presentation skills as well, that is important for any of the research. Here, let’s look at some of the examples. In the following cases, do you choose the quanti or quali research method? The first one, “To explore tourists’ constraints to interact with the hosts”.

In this research area, so far we got limited information in this area in the literature, probably the qualitative research can be a good starting point to conduct such kind of research. The second one, “To examine the relationship between cultural distance and travel intention with Asian tourists traveling in the UK as the context”. This objective is indicating a causal relationship, the relationship between the culture distance and travel intention. In that case, we think the quantitative research might be a good way to conduct it. The next example, “To test the effect of ethnocentrism on foreign goods purchase”. Similarly, this also requires a causal relationship, which means quantitative research may give a better way to do it.

The last example, “what’s the decision-making process for family tourists?” Think about this objective. So the decision making process may involve different stages. And it’s not really a simple causal relationship, and it involves different peoples as well, especially for the family tourists. So in that case, we think the qualitative research approach might be appropriate. Now we understand some of the ways to identify if the quali or quanti fits our research topics. However, is that we have to choose one or the other? Can we use both of them at one study? The answer is yes. Now we’re going to introduce a mixed method approach. So the qualitative and quantitative approaches are not substitutionary, but complementary.

They can work together and work hand in hand. For example, we have several strategies for the mixed method approach. The first one, to start with qualitative method for exploratory purpose followed by the quantitative one for generalizing the results to the population.

The second strategy, to begin with a quantitative method in which theories or concepts are tested, followed by a qualitative method involving detailed exploration with a few cases or individuals.

The third one, the researcher converges quantitative and qualitative data in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the research problem. Studies published in top journals using three different kind of approaches. If you have interest in conducting any of them, when we have time, so just get a taste of different kind of approaches. And this is the end of this section. And I hope you can have a better understanding of those research paradigms and also differences between those quanti and quali researches, and most importantly, to use this information to form your own research approach. Thank you.