Job Crafting by Davide de Gennaro

Author:Davide de Gennaro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838672218
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

META-ANALYSES AND META-SYNTHESES ON JOB CRAFTING

3.1. THE QUANTITATIVE AND THE QUALITATIVE APPROACH: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

Scientific research is a creative process of discovery, developed by a researcher, aimed at producing new knowledge based on existing knowledge. To perform a research usually two different methods can be used: quantitative and qualitative.

There has always been a wide debate about qualitative and quantitative research methods used to carry out experiments of different types and in different fields. Clearly, there are different positions: there are those who claim we can deal with two completely independent strategies based on alternative visions of the world in which to carry out research, and those who instead mix these approaches to obtain a greater variability of data. However, these are two different ways of doing research that lead to generalizing the results in a different way (Burns, 2000; Punch, 1998; Razafsha et al., 2012).

Quantitative research, as the word suggests, helps to gather information that is presented in numerical form. The data obtained thanks to the use of structured and standardized tools (the same for everyone, such as tests and closed-ended questionnaires) can be categorized, sorted, and classified in addition to being measured on numerical scales. From the data it is possible to construct graphs and tables, and then to proceed with their statistical processing thanks to a series of extremely accurate parametric and inferential procedures. Quantitative research deals with quantifying, measuring, and calculating the information obtained through the application of an empirical approach, which consists in measuring with sufficient precision the object of study to arrive at very precise and detailed conclusions. Clearly, such a rigid procedure helps and facilitates the replicability of the study and ensures the generalization of the obtained result. Quantitative research, thanks to its extreme rigor, turns out to be predictive of a series of events, deriving from the verification of research hypotheses, aimed at knowing exactly how a given phenomenon develops and is generated. Furthermore, the quantitative research tends to use a large number of participants, making use of real experiments carried out through the use of highly structured psychometric questionnaires accompanied by standardized rules, from which unequivocal data are inferred. The advantages deriving from quantitative research concern the reproducibility of the data: the data represents an objective confirmation of the observed behavior, which after being measured becomes reproducible and replicable even by those who did not directly participate in the experimentation. In some cases, however, the data obtained through the quantitative method could substantially be confirmations of what the researcher would like to obtain through the carried out research. This is a very obvious bias that in some areas represents a risk. For this, we must never proceed to confirm, but always disconfirming the experimental hypotheses, proceeding by error attempts.

On the contrary, qualitative research leads to the collection of observable information not in numerical form, but through a series of labels or classifications. Data are usually acquired through the use of diaries, open questionnaires, interviews, or unstructured observations. The qualitative data are

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