Remember that there is qualitative and quantitative research.

Quantitative research involves collecting numerical data (things like yes / no and other scales can be encoded as numbers), often from large groups of people, and analysing that to figure out what the various variables describe.

Qualitative research delves into more subjective experiences in things like interviews (and textual data) and they involve smaller groups of people (analysing the data requires more resources which makes it harder to carry out studies with larger groups of people).

Mixed methods research does both.

That's a brief summary.