Importance of Qualitative Data

1. Provides an in-depth understanding

Detailed and descriptive analysis
Qualitative research allows you to explore deeper issues that are more difficult to quantify, such
as attitudes, behaviors, and opinions.
You can use it to discover:
● What consumers think about your brand or product
● How they feel about it
● Why they make certain decisions
An excellent example of how qualitative data helps marketers make better decisions is that it
enables them to understand why consumers respond negatively to a product feature or
promotion.
For example, if sales have dropped following a new promotion, qualitative research can help
determine whether this was due to poor design or timing of the campaign or whether consumers
simply disliked the idea behind the promotion itself.
Take McDonald’s Market Research, for instance.
As part of their efforts to expand their customer base, McDonald’s conducted market research to
gather customer feedback. This involved asking critical questions about their best-performing
products, pricing, effective ads, and popular restaurants. They could see if they were reaching
new customers by analyzing the answers.
Moreover, McDonald’s also collected customer feedback on their products. They discovered that
some customers were unhappy because they wanted healthier options. As a result, they added
healthier items to their menu and started an advertising campaign to inform customers that their
meat was genuine.
Contextualizes data
Qualitative data is like the “behind-the-scenes” information that helps us understand complex
things better. It’s important because it gives us a more in-depth understanding of the subject
being studied by providing additional insights we can’t get from just looking at numbers.
For example, let’s say we want to understand the impact of a new educational program on
students’ academic achievement.
Quantitative data, such as test scores and grades, can tell us if there has been an improvement
or decline in students’ performance.
However, qualitative data can provide additional context and understanding of the factors
contributing to the results.
By conducting interviews with students, teachers, and parents, we can learn about the learning
environment, the teaching methods, and other factors influencing the results.
2. Uncovers unexpected findings
Qualitative data is a less structured form of information than quantitative data. It often consists
of words, experiences, and other forms of unstructured material.
Qualitative researchers use this type of data to understand the meaning behind the numbers or
to discover things that might not be apparent in the numbers or statistics.
Here’s how:
Identifies new areas of inquiry
You’re writing a research paper, and you’ve got some great data. You’ve done your best to make
sense of it, but you’re unsure what to make of the findings.
You might be wondering if there’s more to discover in your data. Could there be hidden insights
that you haven’t uncovered yet?
Qualitative data helps you discover new insights by identifying new areas of inquiry and
examining relationships among the elements in the data set.
For instance, this qualitative report below gives you the bounce rate from all the site pages,
along with the most visited pages with a high bounce rate.

Using this new information, you can work on those pages to let users stay on them and then
convert them into customers.
In qualitative research, we also often uncover surprising findings that weren’t expected at all.
This can happen for many reasons.
Participants tend to give more honest answers when they don’t feel like researchers are judging
them.
Or, participants may have been afraid to say certain things in public (like during a focus group)
but felt more comfortable answering questions in private.
Or our expectations about how people behave might be incorrect because we don’t know
enough about them yet.
Qualitative researchers can use this type of analysis to:
● Identify patterns in unstructured interviews or focus groups.
● Find themes in observation notes.
● Understand why people did what they did in a particular situation.
For example, imagine a study conducted to examine the reasons behind high employee turnover
rates in a company. The quantitative data may have shown that employees were leaving due to
low pay or lack of benefits.
However, by collecting qualitative data through interviews or focus groups, researchers may have
uncovered that employees were leaving due to a toxic work culture or a lack of support from their
managers. This new information could lead to additional research questions and areas of
exploration that may have otherwise been missed.
Can challenge preconceived notions
Qualitative research can challenge preconceived notions because it allows you to explore things
that traditional methods can’t measure.
For example, imagine you are working on a sustainable energy project and want to learn how
people feel about using solar power in their homes. You could analyze their answers using
statistical techniques, but this may not give you an accurate picture of what people think about
solar power because many people won’t respond honestly to a survey question like this.
Instead, you could interview them and ask them specific questions about their feelings about
solar power (i.e., “How do you feel about installing solar panels on your roof?”).
3. Captures perspectives and experiences
Unlike quantitative data, which provides a numerical value to data that you can analyze
statistically, qualitative data allows researchers to delve into individuals’ subjective experiences
and perspectives.
Here’s everything it allows:
Allows for exploration of diverse viewpoints
Qualitative data often entails observations, interviews, focus groups, and other forms of
research. They also use observation techniques such as direct or participant observation, in-
depth interviewing, document analysis, and content analysis.
This level of research naturally paves the way for diverse viewpoints inherent in human
experience.
One example of how qualitative data can capture perspectives and experiences is Starbucks’
approach to gathering customer feedback.
For starters, Starbucks asks buyers to share their feedback on their official site and share ideas
through Twitter. They supervise social media, track cultural trends, and even allow buyers to test
their products in the stores.
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They also have the My Starbucks Idea platform to gather ideas and incessantly enhance their
products. Additionally, Starbucks has implemented more than 275 customer ideas that include
recommendations about new products and methods to improve business responsibility.
These methods allow Starbucks to capture diverse perspectives and experiences, facilitating
decision-making and helping them improve their products and customer service.
Acknowledges the subjectivity of human experiences
Individuals have unique experiences and viewpoints that cannot be fully captured through
objective measures alone. And qualitative data recognizes that.
For example, Pew Research Center found that while most Americans use social media, their
experiences and opinions about its impact on society vary widely based on their age, political
affiliation, and other factors.
This is a testament to the fact that it’s important to consider subjective human experiences,
especially if you’re making decisions that directly affect your target audience.
By engaging with participants in a more exploratory and open-ended way, researchers can
discover new insights and perspectives that may have been overlooked with more rigid
quantitative methods.
4. Allows for the development of hypotheses
Qualitative research helps you to understand what motivates your customers or users. This
information can help you to develop hypotheses about what they want from your product or
information can help you to develop hypotheses about what they want from your product or
service and how they might use it.
For example:
You may have noticed that many people use Instagram to share photos of food with friends and
family members who live far away (or even those who don’t). You could hypothesize that these
users want an easier way to send photos of food than emailing them one at a time whenever
someone wants one sent (and then waiting for each recipient to reply).
Or maybe you believe that many users would like an app that would allow them to read news
stories from multiple sources all in one place.
5. Can complement quantitative data
When we talk about data, most of us refer to quantitative data. Quantitative data is numerical and
measurable. Qualitative data, on the other hand, is subjective and qualitative. It’s not easy to put
into numbers and measure with a ruler or a scale.
However, you can use qualitative research in conjunction with quantitative data to provide
context for your results.
For example:
● If you’re testing out a new feature on your website, it would be useful to know
how people feel about it by asking them directly with a survey.
● If you’re trying to understand why people are leaving your site after visiting one
particular page, does this mean the content on that page needs improvement? Or does it
indicate that users aren’t happy with their experience on the site in general?
Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods together gives you a better
understanding of what’s happening behind the scenes of your product or service and make
decisions based on real feedback from real customers rather than just guessing what they might
want or need next time around (which is basically what most companies do).
Lego is an example of a company that combines quantitative and qualitative data.