In the next four posts, I will be looking at the RACE process and PR.  The stages of this process includes:

1. Research
2. Action 
3. Communication
4.  Evaluation

In my study of communications methods, quantitative was never a problem for me to understand because it was based on numbers and statistics.  But when it came to qualitative, I never seemed to value why we need to understand how people thought and felt because it was hard to quantify.  How do you measure thoughts and feelings?  And an even bigger question to me is, is this important to research? This topic brings me back to my communication studies days at McMaster.  I had to study research methods and a class I had to take was qualitative research methods.  I hated the class to the point that I took it twice and dropped it because I could not stand the content.  A big topic in the class was the study of semiotics.  Defined as the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing.  

Semiotics is broken down into three branches: pragmatics-the study of language and its use; semantics-the study of meaning; syntactics-the formal properties of languages and systems of symbols.  As a communicator language is the core of my business, and language study is important when it comes to messaging, but why have an entire research method based around the intangible. 

I guess I need to get over myself and my non-understanding of qualitative research methods.  It must be important if communications, as a discipline, finds that it is necessary to understand, develop and use when conducting some forms of research.  I still need to accept that qualitative measures, including thoughts, feelings and beliefs, have and effect on messaging.  My question is now shifting from importance to why not use quantified methods?  It gives a researcher hard numerical facts to work with.  That is something tangible, unlike thoughts feelings and beliefs (very intangible).