Quantitative research is different from qualitative because it deals more with hard facts and the results of scholarly studies that test theories and make predictions based on statistics. While looking for a quantitative research article, I noticed that the articles were comprised of experiments and surveys, numbers and objectives and controlled responses. It reminded me about the differences between sociology and psychology courses. I had enrolled in a psychology course when working on my Associates degree in 2002. It was a 7pm - 9pm class two nights a week. Since I'm not nor never have been a typical college student...going back to school when I was 27, I was also working a full time job. That 7pm - 9pm slot was a risk to my ability to be at my 7am math class. (I was a glutton for punishment then too.) I went to this first class in psychology and the instructor was going over what material we would be covering. It started to dawn on me that psychology was a lot of numbers and scientific theories and studies that seemed very black and white. It was very controlled and I could see that there would be a lot more to this than I had imagined. I'm more of a creative person, right-brained I think it's called, at least most of the time. So, I didn't think that psychology was the class for me. It was the first class I ever withdrew from. A couple semesters later, I enrolled in a sociology class which was more relatable. There were observations, social studies on different cultures and it was fascinating to me to understand how we behave and function in the world we are born into, whatever that world is. I took an anthropology course around that time too and both of those classes touched my right-brained-ness in the stories that came out of it, and the subjectivity of those two sciences.
Quantitative research, at least what I found, was informative and was more about objective and conceptual tools and systems.
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