Quantitative versus qualitative approaches to tacit knowledge testing

Research in knowledge management covering tacit knowledge tends to be descriptive and often makes little use of empiricism. Psychology as another discipline is very empirical and tends to use statistics to process quantitative data. There are alternative approaches to interpreting data that do not rely on reductionist approaches along numerical lines. We do not negate statistics; rather we provide an alternative to statistical processing of empirical tacit knowledge data. Using empirical data, we show how graphical, qualitative data analysis was used to interpret lower level patterns in the data on tacit knowledge enabling more meaningful quantitative data analysis.