2 Miles and Huberman 2 said that qualitative data “are a source of well-grounded, rich descriptions and explanations of processes in identifiable local contexts. Qualitative research was historically employed in fields such as sociology, history, and anthropology. It enables researchers to obtain insights into what it feels like to be another person and to understand the world as another experiences it. Qualitative research involves asking participants about their experiences of things that happen in their lives.
Much of the work of clinicians (including pharmacists) takes place within a social, clinical, or interpersonal context where statistical procedures and numeric data may be insufficient to capture how patients and health care professionals feel about patients’ care. Rather, they attempt to find examples of behaviour, to clarify the thoughts and feelings of study participants, and to interpret participants’ experiences of the phenomena of interest, in order to find explanations for human behaviour in a given context. Possibly the most important point about qualitative research is that its practitioners do not seek to generalize their findings to a wider population.
In a quantitative study, large amounts of data can be collected about the number of people who hold certain attitudes toward their health and health care, but what qualitative study tells us is why people have thoughts and feelings that might affect the way they respond to that care and how it is given (in this way, qualitative and quantitative data are frequently complementary). What is missing from quantitative research methods is the voice of the participant.
1 Pharmacists may have used such methods to carry out audits or surveys within their own practice settings if so, they may have had a sense of “something missing” from their data. Quantitative research can be defined as “the means for testing objective theories by examining the relationship among variables which in turn can be measured so that numbered data can be analyzed using statistical procedures”. As scientifically trained clinicians, pharmacists may be more familiar and comfortable with the concept of quantitative rather than qualitative research.
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