In the context of sociology, how do qualitative research methods differ from quantitative research methods when utilizing interviews as a data collection tool?

In sociology, qualitative research methods focus on understanding people's feelings, thoughts, and experiences in depth, while quantitative research methods aim to measure and analyze numerical data for patterns. When using interviews, qualitative researchers might ask open-ended questions to encourage participants to share detailed stories and insights about their lives. For example, if studying how people cope with stress, a qualitative interview might explore personal experiences in a narrative form. In contrast, quantitative researchers would likely ask specific, closed questions to gather data that can be easily counted, such as rating stress on a scale from 1 to 10. This difference impacts how researchers interpret the data, with qualitative methods seeking rich, descriptive information and quantitative methods focusing on statistical analysis.