Understanding your audience, refining your messaging, or evaluating a product concept starts with choosing the right research approach. At Redge, we combine speed, affordability, and expert insights to deliver high-impact market research. Here's a guide to navigating the key differences between qualitative and quantitative research—and when to use each.
Qualitative Research: Depth Over Breadth
Purpose: Qualitative research helps uncover motivations, perceptions, and attitudes. It’s ideal for exploring ideas, discovering new opportunities, or understanding the “why” behind consumer behaviour.
Common Study Types:
- In-depth Interviews (IDIs): One-on-one conversations that explore individual perspectives in detail.
- Focus Groups: Guided discussions with a small group to uncover shared attitudes or divergent opinions.
- Ethnographic Studies: Observations of participants in real-life settings to capture natural behaviors.
- Chat-based surveys: where questions are delivered and answered in a conversational format. These mimic the feel of a natural dialogue, which can make participants more comfortable and likely to share in-depth responses.
Example Questions:
- “Why do you say that?”
- “What do you most like about ...”
- “If Brand X was a person, what sort of person would they be?"”
Outputs
In the not-too-distant past, qualitative (open-ended data) was very difficult and expensive to analyse, which is why sample sizes were kept small. Nowadays, AI plays a role in synthesising and summarising responses. AI can also be used to extract sentiment, provide counts of themes, and explain the primary and secondary emotions expressed in responses.
Explore Redge's bespoke qualitative options or take a look at our Brand Imagery study to see how we use qualitative question design in an automated study.
Quantitative Research: Breadth with Statistical Rigor
Purpose: Quantitative research validates hypotheses with numerical data. It’s best used for measuring trends, testing concepts at scale, or confirming insights from qualitative work.
Common Study Types:
- Surveys: Structured questionnaires distributed to a large sample.
- Concept Testing: Evaluating new ideas or ads to predict market performance.
- Tracking Studies: Monitoring brand or campaign performance over time.
Example Questions:
- “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product?”
- “Which of the following features is most important to you?”
- “How often do you use this service?”
Outputs
Quantitative data is typically reported using visualisations like bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs. These formats help clearly communicate trends, comparisons, and distributions by transforming numbers into digestible visuals. For example, pie charts are effective for showing proportions, while bar charts are useful for comparing metrics across categories. They look simple, but if you've ever spent time building a dashboard you'll know that it can take some time to get right. Traditional research agencies will clean and sort this data before generating charts in statistical software and copying them across to PowerPoint. At Redge we do this automatically, as we've designed the right chart for the right question ahead of time.
Explore Redge's Concept Test and Product Feedback study for examples which include quantitative methods.
Integrating Both Approaches for Holistic Insights
At Redge, we often use a hybrid approach, using a combination of 'quant' style questions with closed responses, and qual/open-ended questions to gather both the hard data and the ability to interpret and understand why. Because our sample sizes are entirely flexible, we work with clients individually to tailor a sample which allows for a level of statistical validity, or, where that the is less of an issue and budget and/or time are more important, we can use much smaller sample sizes with more qualitative focus and still generate highly valuable insight for hypothesis generation or idea stimulation.
Whether you're refining messaging, testing concepts, or tracking brand health, choosing the right method—or the right mix—is essential. Our team brings the expertise to guide you through the process, ensuring that every project delivers insights you can act on.
Let’s talk about your next research project. Reach out to explore how we can help.
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