Understanding Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods in Global Health (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to this Global Health YouTube channel. My name's Greg Martin. We're going to do a few videos that look at study design and research methods. Now we're going to look at epidemiological research, we're going to look at the social sciences like anthropology, and essentially we're going to try and unpack how it is that these different kinds of research fit together to provide us with the science and understanding necessary to make clinical and public health decisions. Now typically, people tend to think of research methods in terms of qualitative research and quantitative research, and they're these two distinct disciplines or two distinct types of research methods, and the qualitative research is the domain of the social scientists and anthropologists, and the quantitative research is the domain of the epidemiologists and economists. And what I'd like to talk to you a little bit about is the fact that these two groups of people actually use both sets of research methods. So let's just jump right in and try and understand these different research techniques and research methods. Qualitative research tends to answer questions like who, what, why, when, and how. It tries to unpack and understand the nature of a phenomenon or the qualities associated with a particular phenomenon. By contrast, quantitative research answers the question of how much. It considers the idea of magnitude. So when we're talking about magnitude, the how much, the quantitative research, we're talking about the how much of, firstly, an occurrence, so the incidence or prevalence of a disease in a community, and we're talking about the magnitude or the how much of a relationship, so the association, for example, between a risk factor and an outcome. So now I'm just going to quickly give you an overview of some of the research methods used in these two groups of methods, qualitative research and quantitative research. In qualitative research, we may do a simple observation of what's happening in a community or you might be looking down a microscope, for example, that's qualitative research. We may do in-depth interviews or key informant interviews. We may do focus groups and speak to a group of people. We may do surveys. All of this is to try and unpack and understand the underlying nature or qualities within a phenomenon. The other group, the quantitative research, now we've got interventional quantitative research and we've got non-interventional. By non-interventional, we mean it's observational. We're watching to see what happens in the world and we're counting something up. So in that sense, we might be doing case control studies and we'll talk more about that in a future video. We may be doing cohort studies and I'm specifically going to talk in a future video about the difference between those two and their relative strengths and weaknesses. We may do an ecological study and we may, of course, also be doing a survey and just collecting data in that sense. Then of course, there's the interventional trials and the one we talk about most are randomized control trials or double-blind randomized control trials. We're going to do an entire video that looks specifically at that. Okay, thanks for listening. I hope that was helpful. This was just a synopsis, an overview of the various research methods that we use. In future videos, we're going to dig down a little deeper and look at some of the details of these different study designs and research methods that get used. If you're thinking of subscribing to this channel, let me give you one or two reasons why I think that's a great idea. Firstly, if you subscribe to the channel, you get an email alert whenever there's a new video posted and so you'll be up to date on the things that we say and do here on the channel. But secondly, I send out video content that goes exclusively to people who subscribe to this channel. I think of the people who subscribe to the channel as a subset of the broader audience and they're more likely to be people that are interested in job opportunities in the global health space and where it is that they might find opportunities to do consulting work in global health. I'm putting together, they're a little less formal, they're a little less flashy, but videos that just kind of talk people through what's out there and what's happening in the global health workspace. Subscribe to the channel. Thanks for watching. I'll be back.