Quantitative Method

Tools such as psychological tests, questionnaires and structured interviews typically contain a series of close-ended questions, where the question and its likely responses are both specified in advance, and where responses are usually given in some scaled form indicating strength or magnitude (for instance, from 1, indicating 'low', up to 5, 7 or 11, indicating 'high'), or as simple right/wrong answers that a researcher can score as 1 or 0. The quantitative method converts these responses into numbers, and it is this conversion that gives the method its name: a psychological attribute such as intelligence or academic achievement is turned into a quantity, and the researcher then totals these numbers to arrive at each participant's aggregate score on the attribute being studied. To draw conclusions from these scores, a researcher may compare a single individual's score against the group average, or compare the average scores of two different groups against each other, and this generally calls for statistical procedures, ranging from simple measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and variability (range, quartile deviati …