In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, much large-scale quantitative research will be conducted to follow the spread of the virus among a variety of geographies, demographic groups, and political settings, in order to understand how it spread, and what the outcomes were.
In this essay, you must discuss: what is the benefit of qualitative research in supporting our understanding of how the pandemic has affected people’s lives? How might these different approaches to research complement one another? What can qualitative research offer to our understanding of this story, and what are its limits? Using examples of different research designs and methodologies that we have studied in this course, and in articles that you find, propose some questions or problems to be solved in order to illustrate the benefits of qualitative research in improving our response to a future situation such as this.
You must include 5 scholarly sources (from academic, peer-reviewed journals), quoted and cited appropriately.