Qualitative and subjective are not the same!

January 27, 2004 · 8 Comments

This entry was originally at http://kingsley.blog-city.com/read/442022.htm

You’d think people who go to business school can tell the difference, right? You’d be so wrong! I ran into a bunch of b-schoolers who are so focussed on quantizing everything that they cannot accept any qualitative research as legitimate. They think that all qualitative data is subjective. This is just not true. So here it is, the clue-train stop for arrogant number crunchers: good data is data that represents the problem domain adequately, not just any data you are comfortable dealing with.

For example, in a usability test, I could quantize the hell out of the time taken for every mouse movement or click, but it wouldn’t tell me squat about why the user took a long time to place an order. Only when I make a qualitative observation can I tell if the user was distracted by a flashing ad or slowed down by having to read too much stuff. That is qualitative data that is not subjective. Any sane person would make the same observation that yes, the user was indeed busy drooling at Urmila pics and forgot all about his shopping cart full of Dummy’s books.

Lesson: Sometimes, the best data you can gather to solve a problem is qualitative in nature. Deal with it. Quantizing that data will only contort the observations and in turn, the findings.

PS: There isn’t anything wrong with subjective data either,as long as it’s appropriately labelled and stored in dummy-proof containers.

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