Research Design - Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods

Bias is often used as a term in social research to cover any form of influence that’s felt to provide some form of distortion of research data and findings. Yet, students often misuse or overuse the terms bias, value-free and objective when they’re talking about qualitative research. In this resource, I will explain why qualitative research isn’t biased. I will focus on these two messages:

• Qualitative research isn’t biased just because data collection and analysis is not standardised.

• Qualitative research isn’t biased just because it can’t be generalised in the quantitative sense.

In qualitative research, the researcher is an integral part of the process and the final product. Separating the research out from this is not possible, and also not desirable.