Why Immersive Technology Needs More Than a Score: “The Case for Qualitative Research in Immersive Technology”
As immersive technology becomes more widely used in education, healthcare, training, design, and social spaces, researchers face an important question: How do we understand what people actually experience in XR?
Questionnaires, rating scales, and other quantitative measures remain valuable tools. They can help researchers compare groups, test hypotheses, measure outcomes, and identify patterns across larger samples. But these tools can only assess the concepts researchers have already chosen to measure.
Qualitative research helps fill that gap.
In The Case for Qualitative Research in Immersive Technology, Sarah Barker, PhD, explains why interviews, observation, phenomenology, and other qualitative approaches are vital for discovering aspects of immersive experiences that may not fit neatly into a predefined scale.
For example, studies of virtual reality presence have found that users do not all describe “feeling present” in the same way. Some connect it to visual quality, freedom of interaction, or being temporarily removed from everyday life. In clinical VR, participants have described virtual environments as safe places to practice difficult situations before carrying new skills into the real world. Other research shows that avatars can support identity exploration and self-expression—while immersive experiences intended to promote wellbeing can also bring up unexpected feelings of sadness, loss, or disconnection.
These findings matter because they reveal the context behind the numbers. A wellbeing score, presence rating, or completion metric may identify an outcome, but it may not explain why someone responded that way, what barriers they encountered, or what design choices shaped their experience.
Qualitative research also reminds us that the immersive experience begins before a person puts on a headset. Developers, designers, organizational priorities, accessibility practices, technical limitations, and interdisciplinary workflows all influence what users ultimately encounter.
The goal is not to choose qualitative research instead of quantitative research. The strongest immersive technology research often needs both. Quantitative methods can show whether an intervention works; qualitative methods can reveal how people experienced it, for whom it worked, what was missed, and what should be studied next.