Written by​ ​Abdelhak
The today’s world is developing and discovering new things insanely in a rapid way, thanks to
academic and scientific research. Since these research became a huge part of our lives therefore we
should get to know their types and how they are often used. Several types of research exists, one of
these types is “Quantitative Research”. This kind of research most of the time focus on numbers and
graphs to test and confirm hypotheses and assumptions.
A research is "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge,
including knowledge of humans, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise
new applications”​[1]​.Quantitative research is defined as a “systematic investigation of phenomena by
gathering quantifiable data and performing statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques”​[2]​.
And ​are commonly used to generalize a facts about a certain topics. Quantitative research mainly
focus on quantity in order to achieve their purpose.
All what we have mentioned above can not be done without using data collection tools, that
are specified for quantitative research. First, we have surveys, and they are the most fundamental
and the most used tool in quantitative research with its various types and it can be represented in
various forms such as online surveys, online polls, and questionnaires...etc. These tools are very
common when conducting a quantitative research is needed, because they do provide the perfect
possibility to have quantifiable data, in order to analyze it and let you extract something useful from
the data you have got, without much effort and pain and most of the time they are accurate, it
depends on how you structure your questionnaire and the questions included in it.
Now let us take a deeper insight in quantitative research types so you can distinguish between
them or in order to get confused. There are four main types of quantitative research. First, the
descriptive one, it does provide a description for a certain phenomena, events, groups, individuals,
and even real life situations. Second, comparative research, it can be defined as an investigation of
the relationship between two or more variables. And we have also the quasi-experimental research,
this type often seeks to establish a cause-effect relationship between two or more variables without
manipulating the independent variable and most of the time it should be done randomly without
pre-preparation. Whereas the fourth type Experimental (empirical) is the same as quasi-experimental,
but this time researchers are allowed to pre-prepare their stuff and manipulate whatever variable they
want and this type also called true experimentation.
As a conclusion, quantitative research these days are not only used in academic and scientific
fields, they are used pretty much everywhere, especially in information-technology with the rise of a
new technological term which called BigData. And also they are used in business and other related
fields
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2.
(Frascati Manual. The Measurement of Scientific, Technological and Innovation Activities. isbn:9789264238800).
https://www.questionpro.com/blog/quantitative-research/