ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the specific context of quantitative research, to introduce some key terms of quantitative research with references for further reading and to provide links on Survey Methods, Secondary Analysis and Statistical Analysis. The use of quantitative data from secondary sources for descriptive purposes is very common in thesis work, for example it would be natural to accompany a discussion of the prevalence of a certain crime by appropriate Home Office statistics. The objective of quantitative research may either be specified prior to data collection in the form, for example, of hypotheses to be tested, or else the research might be viewed as more open-ended and exploratory with relationships between variables expected to reveal themselves at the analysis stage. A key distinction in quantitative research is between experimental and non-experimental designs.
