Reading and an Interview with My Professor

 This week our assignment was to watch and review a What's Hot and What's Not video between Dr. Battacharya and Dr. Liang. This is intriguing on many levels if only becasue I'm reading Dr. Battacharya's book (see here) and taking a class by Dr. Liang right now. 

What I really liked about the what's hot and what's not with Dr. Liang this week was the advice she gives at the end. 

I thought Dr. Liang expressed that reason for a foundational understanding of qualitative research and how just because quantitative is far more structured and strict, that doesn't mean that qualitative research methods can be too loose and freeform. 

I'm beginning to understand that qualitative research takes more individual attributes into account about the subjects who are being tested, but that there seem to be distinct measurement criteria as well. It's important to put the work into the research design to be sure that you are getting quality answers to your questions so that it's verifiable, valid and the reader can trust the research. I'm reminded of the database project manager maxim, "garbage in/garbage out." Meaning that if you want to get good data out of your database, be sure you're putting good data in. It seems that the same thing goes for qualitative research.