What Does quantitative Mean
Even Latin you have to leave, symbolically speaking, in order to find the etymological origin of the word quantitative that we are dealing with now. It is derived from the sum of two clearly differentiated parts:
• “Quantum”, which means “how much”.
• The suffix “-tive”, which is used to indicate a passive or active relationship.
Quantitative is an adjective that is linked to quantity . This concept, for its part, refers to an amount, a magnitude, a portion or a number of things.
The quantitative, therefore, presents information about a certain quantity. For example: "The quantitative analysis of the medals obtained shows a poor performance of our athletes in the Olympic Games" , "The manager asked me for a quantitative report on the meetings we had with suppliers in the last year" , "I prefer to focus on other things beyond the quantitative, since the figures do not express all the complexity of the phenomenon ” .
The existence of what has been called quantitative research must be highlighted. She intends to make a decision regarding certain alternatives, which have the particularity that there is a relationship between them that can be represented numerically.
This type of quantitative methodology also includes various modalities such as descriptive, experimental, analytical or quasi-experimental.
All this without forgetting that this type of research is defined by the following characteristics:
• It is based on logical positivism.
• It has a marked particularistic character, since what it does is analyze the existing reality by decomposing it into different variables.
• It is also based on the stimulus-response binomial.
• It is in charge of generating numerical data to proceed to represent the social group.
• Offers a static reality.
• It is considered to be objective.
• To analyze the data in its possession, it proceeds to make use of both statistical methods and theories or statistical inference procedures.
• This kind of research, also called quantitative methodology, is defined, in the same way, by the fact that it performs a controlled measurement of the situation and that it is clearly oriented to achieve a certain result.
It is common for quantitative analysis (aimed at studying the quantities of something) to be opposed to qualitative analysis (focused on quality or quality ). Suppose that a sports journalist analyzes the trajectory of two tennis players. One of them won four Challenger category tournaments , while the other won only one title, but which is part of the Masters . A quantitative analysis will rank the top tennis player better (he obtained four tournaments against each other), but a qualitative analysis will reveal that the Masters tournament is more important than the four Challenger tournaments .
The employee of a cookie factory, for his part, can present quantitative reports of his work when he communicates how many cookies he produced in a certain time (twenty kilograms in eight hours, to name one possibility). If the worker, on the other hand, reports on the composition of the cookies (chocolate, vanilla, etc.), he will have carried out a different analysis of his work.