Workshop on the Qualitative and Quantitative

Francis EZ, Kimmel CA, Rees DC (1990) Workshop on the qualitative and quantitative comparability of human and animal developmental neurotoxicity summary and implications. Neurotoxicol Teratol, 12(3) 285-292. 

Usually, some lines of evidence will not be suitable for direct incorporation into quantitative analysis. Semiquantitative or qualitative methods will then be needed to weigh the different lines of evidence, including the quantitative assessment, and integrate them for decision making. Methods for assessing weight of evidence were outside the scope of the workshop that developed this book but are discussed by Suter et al. (2000) and were recently the focus of another workshop (Chapman et al. 2002). Whatever method is used for weighing different lines of evidence, it will be important to characterize uncertainties in each line of evidence and show their effect on the overall assessment outcome. 

Brandsseter (2002) describes its implementation and the use of risk analysis in the offshore industry using quantitative and qualitative approaches. Brandsseter (2002) work is a contribution to the EC-JCR International Workshop on Promotion of Technical Harmonization on Risk-Based Decision Making (2000) and its format is in response to a set of questions prepared by the organizers of the workshop, where both mentioned models are discussed. 

The inclusion of external use/need knowledge is also one of the main issues of marketing science (Hauser et al. 2006), and remains a remarkable challenge for research and practice (Marketing Science Institute 2010). This task can be attributed to marketing research in organizations (McDaniel and Gates 2008). Many different methods have been developed to assess customer needs, which can be broadly divided Into quantitative (conjoint analysis, quality function deployment) and qualitative techniques (focus interviews, consumer workshops). All of these methods rely on the assumption that users or consumers have the ability to articulate or express their needs. Yet this is only possible for those needs, of which customers are aware themselves. Latent needs, which are crucial for the development of new product, cannot be acquired via these techniques, as they cannot be made explicit by users (Narver et al. 2004). 

Specific functions have been constructed by Bernstein and Zapas [2] based on experimental data and calculations based on such functions have shown specific quantitative realizations of the behavior described qualitatively here. Further experimental data and examples of realization of such behavior is given in the article by Crissman and Zapas [4] in these workshop proceedings. 

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