Quite often, the focus of analytics efforts is highly skewed towards quantitative aspects and the qualitative efforts are either negligible or replaced by the executives’ “gut feeling”. It is imperative to understand how such a casual approach can hurt your business. 

 

The analysis of qualitative data through the methods generally used for qualitative research is referred to as Qualitative Analytics. The differentiation between Qualitative and Quantitative analytics is not always obvious. For example, during Text Analytics, measuring the frequency of certain words would be considered Quantitative Analytics; whereas exploring the contextual meaning of popular words would be considered Qualitative Analytics. In other words, Qualitative Analytics includes the analysis of context, human behavior, emotions and other factors that are hard to digitize without losing any meaning. 

 

Qualitative analytics is a very powerful tool for exploratory research – the earliest phase of analytics. It is also a great tool to bridge the gap between insights provided by quantitative research, and provide in-depth understanding of the underlying reasons and motivations for a phenomenon. Pragmatic qualitative research is done through a variety of methods. While some of them are simple such as Surveys and Interviews, others are highly advanced such as Ethnography and Phenomenology. 

 

One of the most common myths about qualitative analytics is that it is useful only for academic researchers in selected fields such as social sciences and neuroscience marketing. The truth is that - almost all business problems have a qualitative aspect, and thus, quantitative analysis alone would never be able to tell the complete story.