Final answer:
Qualitative methods are useful for gathering in-depth insights into human behavior and cultural phenomena, providing a narrative approach to understanding social realities, as opposed to the numerical and statistically-focused quantitative data.
Step-by-step explanation:
It may be helpful to use qualitative methods to assess communities when you want to understand reasons behind people's actions, need to gather in-depth insights, or when your team lacks expertise in quantitative analysis and is dealing with a large group of people where individual experiences matter. Qualitative methods emphasize subjective understanding through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and content analysis, allowing researchers to capture the complexities of human behavior and cultural phenomena. Unlike quantitative data, which is numerical and can be counted or statistically analyzed, qualitative data provides a narrative and descriptive approach, offering a richer and more nuanced understanding of social realities.
Quantitative methods in social research include statistical analyses, such as analyzing census data or conducting surveys with a large number of participants, to find patterns in human behavior. By comparison, qualitative methods seek to explain these patterns by understanding the context within which they occur, which can be gained from detailed qualitative data such as observations and open-ended survey responses. Anthropologists and other social scientists often employ a mix of both types of data to provide a comprehensive understanding of cultural and social dynamics, benefiting from the strengths of each approach.