The Differences And Complements Between Quantitative Research And Qualitative Research In The Field Of Education

With continuous education hot issues appeared,researchers paid attention to the research method of education and started to explore the essence of complex education issues.Education research method develops fast to be pluralistic and integrated and study about the complementary and symbiosis of Quantitative research and Qualitative research.Because of some social history aspects,the relationship between Quantitative research and Qualitative research is quite controversial.In 1970 s,most of the researchers take them as totally opposite research methods.As they have different ideas on ontology and epistemology result in distinct research situation,process and data analysis.While in 1990 s,with the development of Interdisciplinary technology,people began to review the relationship between Quantitative research and Qualitative research,and tried to prove their complementary from various subjects.This paper is based on the difference between Quantitative research and Qualitative research,to study the complementary and symbiosis of them from their historic development,philosophic overlap and analysis process.This research applied the documentary and case analysis method mainly.Through collecting present documents and works on Quantitative research and Qualitative research,this paper find three aspects of their difference.First is the epistemology,as Quantitative research is based on positivism epistemology,while Qualitative research believed in interpretive epistemology.Secondly,they have distinct and relative relationships on their research target and range.Quantitative research pays more attention to study the reason and result for formative research,while Qualitative research stresses to explain their phenomena.Thirdly,their sampling method and requirements are quite different as well as research method during application.According to all above aspects,this paper makes comparative study while doing the complementary research which takes “Flipped Classroom interpret teaching research” as an example,to illustrate the complementary areas between them.Then,point out the premise of research methods and the principles.