Recognition & Understanding

Qualitative research is focused on understanding a concept, idea, or experience from the perspective of the people you’re building for. This concern with an emic (or insider's) perspective drives nearly everything about qualitative research. Understanding the experience from the “outside” perspective gives you details that you couldn’t get from quantitative research.

Qualitative research wants to recognize how people make sense of the world around them. Everyone – including yourself – has a specific, rich, unique, and evolving view of the worldview. Your personal experiences, education, and history have led you to view the outside world in a particular way. You can think of this as a lens that shapes and colors how you see and understand the world around you.

This lens is based your personal experiences and how your brain has constructed or created meaning from those experiences. This lens is a culmination of everything that you've has experienced. And the more you experience, the more your lens changes. And you can only interpret the world around you through your lens. The diagram below shows this idea more clearly.

Each “ring” represents how diverse and interconnected your lens is. Different people don’t have more or less rings but there are differences in how all of the rings work together. Two people could have similar life experiences or demographics but differently, interpret the world. But why does this matter?

Your personal lens affects how you interpret information about the outside world.

All the information and signals you take in from the outside world “pass through” your lens, affecting how your brain interprets and stores that information. With qualitative research, your goal is to recognize and understand someone else’s lens while trying to recognize and limit your lens from influencing or affecting the data you collect. How does someone interpret specific ideas? What does the product or experience mean to them? What values do people place on certain behaviors, items, or social rules?

People construct meaning based on their experiences. Qualitative research interprets those experiences to recognize how people construct that meaning. But in an experience research setting, you’re not trying to understand one person’s lens but recognize and capture how several people construct meaning towards specific product topics and ideas.

By collecting qualitative data from several participants, you can recognize patterns in how people make sense of those topics, the product, and the world around theme. These patterns eventually become qualitative themes (an idea covered more in Collection 5, Handbook 2).

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Qualitative Activities

Qualitative research can be used in a variety of situations. What’s consistent is why you take a qualitative approach in the first place. Research questions focused on exploration, discovery, motivation, or rationale all benefit from a qualitative approach. Other qualitative activities are listed below:

Many of these activities require a basic qualitative approach, where you use non-random sampling, collect data directly from participants, and analyze the data using some form of qualitative analysis to understand how people make sense of the product and the world around it.

You can read about other qualitative approaches here. Please note that while these other approaches are powerful, they require more time for planning, alignment, and prepping. If you’re new to qualitative research, stick with a basic qualitative study to get experience.

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Qualitative Benefits & Limitations

There are many reasons to use or avoid taking a qualitative approach. Once you know them, you can design your study to work with or around these reasons, making it more likely that you collect meaningful data.

It’s up to you, the researcher, to determine if (a) the research question needs a qualitative approach, and if it does, (2) can you manage or reduce any weaknesses or risks that come with any qualitative study? If you answered “yes” to both questions, then a qualitative approach might be perfect for your study.

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Qualitative Data

You collect non-numerical data using a qualitative method. This data is text-based, instead of statistics and percentages. Things like written transcripts of what a participant says, audio/video recordings, drawings, and other materials collected with consent (such as a drawing or object) are all examples of qualitative data.

Qualitative data is best described and represented with text, not numbers.

But no matter how prepared and attentive you are, you really can’t collect everything from a session. Even if you get consent and record a session, you’re still only analyzing the specific, relevant data to answer your specific research questions. Be reflexive about what you do and don’t collect in every session, knowing that some qualitative data can be more informative than others.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at how qualitative research studies the “truth”. In this context, the “truth” is the best possible or most accurate themes that capture the meaning intended by participants.

When you take a qualitative approach, you inherently assume the “truth” is constructed, not observed or fixed.