CMN 3103 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Logical Positivism, Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Communication
• Course: CMN 3103
• Professor: Peruvemba Jaya

Document Summary

Qualitative research refers to the meanings, concepts, definitions, characteristics, metaphors, symbols, and descriptions of things. Quantitative research refers to counts and measures of things, the extents and distributions of our subject matter: how large of a thing is, how many of them there are, or how likely we are to encounter one. The meanings that we give to events and things come from their qualities. To understand our lives, we need qualitative research. We can study and measure qualities as collections of meanings, as a spectrum of states of being, but not as precise solid objects. Qualitative and quantitative methods give us different, complementary pictures of things we observe. One popular and important area of research concerning social norms the normatively expected and. All qualities can be quantified up to a point, just as all quantitative data have qualitative aspects informally enforced patterns of behavior that are widely shared within any given society.