Research Methods - Introduction video transcript

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 the industry to make clinical and public health decisions.

Now typically people tend to think of research methods in terms of qualitative research and quantitative research. These 2 distinct disciplines or 2 distinct types of research methods and the qualitative research is the domain of the social scientists and the anthropologists and the quantitative research is the domain of the epidemiologists and the economists and what I’d like to talk to you a little bit about is the fact that these 2 groups of people actually use both sets of research methods.

So let’s just jump in and try to 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 talk about magnitude, the ‘how much’, the quantitative research, we’re talking about how much firstly of an occurrence so the incidence or prevalence of the disease in the community and we’re talking about the magnitude or how much of a relationship. So the association for example between a risk factor and an outcome.

I’m just going to quickly give you an overview of some of the research methods used in these 2 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 is 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 where 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 2 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. The of course there’s the interventional trials and the one we talk about most are randomised control trials or double-blind randomised control trials and we’re going to do an entire video that looks specifically at them.

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 gets used.

Research Methods - Introduction video

Back to Business psychology as a science