On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Evert Verhagen on the show to discuss qualitative research and how the outcomes can be useful for clinical sports practice. Evert Verhagen is a human movement scientist and epidemiologist. He holds a University Research Chair as a full professor at the Department of Public and Occupational Health of the VU University Medical Center and the Amsterdam Movement Science Research Institute. He chairs the department's research theme 'Sports, Lifestyle and Health', is the director of the Amsterdam Collaboration on Health and Safety in Sports (one of the 11 IOC research centers), and co-director of the Amsterdam Institute of Sports Sciences (AISS).   In this episode, we discuss: -The difference between qualitative and quantitative research -How qualitative research influences sports medicine and injury prevention research and clinical practice -How to design a qualitative research study and control for biases -What is in store for the future of qualitative research in sports medicine -And so much more!   Resources: Evert Verhagen Twitter Email: e.verhagen@amsterdamumc.nl Sports Lifestyle and Health Research Website IOC World Conference Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport   For more information on Evert: Evert Verhagen is a human movement scientist and epidemiologist. He holds a University Research Chair as a full professor at the Department of Public and Occupational Health of the VU University Medical Center and the Amsterdam Movement Science Research Institute. He chairs the department's research theme 'Sports, Lifestyle and Health', is the director of the Amsterdam Collaboration on Health and Safety in Sports (one of the 11 IOC research centers), and co-director of the Amsterdam Institute of Sports Sciences (AISS). His research revolves around the prevention of sports and physical activity related injuries; including monitoring, cost-effectiveness and implementation issues. He supervises several (inter-)national PhDs and post-docs on these topics, and has (co-)authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications around these topics.   Read the full transcript below: Karen Litzy:                   00:00                Hi Evert. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to have you on. Evert Verhagen:            00:04                Yeah, thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here as well. Karen Litzy:                   00:08                All right, so today we're going to be talking about qualitative research in mainly sports medicine. But before we even start, can you give the listeners the definitions and perhaps the difference between quantitative research and qualitative research? Evert Verhagen:            00:30                Sure. I think that is a really valid question to start with. I believe most people are familiar with quantitative research. It is what we do like in the word already, quantification of a problem by counting, by having numerical data or data that we can transform into statistics. And then we can quantify attitudes, opinions, define variables. And we can generalize that across the whole group of our population. So we can generate averages in given populations and we can compare averages between populations. Qualitative research on the other hand, doesn't go by numbers, it's more exploratory. And we try to get an understanding of reasons, opinions, motivations and instead of quantifying a problem. So, giving a number to it, giving a magnitude to it, we get insight into the problem and it helps us to develop new ideas and our policies. And that can be a precursor to do a bigger quantitative study in which you have an idea of where to look and where you would like to quantify and get some more thought. But you can also do it afterwards, where you have a quantifiable outcome and you want to understand better what that outcome actually means and what it means to your population and in the population. I think that is in essence the big diff