Quality Control (QC) and Quality Assurance (QA) are terms rarely used in social sciences though they are in manufacturing industries. For a social scientist seeking jobs in the industries, learning their vocabularies are essential.
QA can be defined as procedures that assure that the product being manufactured will be of good quality.
QC can be defined as assessments of the product once manufactured.
For a social scientist, a product would be a report or article. Commonly used guides or requirements to write a report in a given field can be seen as belonging to quality assurance. Meeting with colleagues, fellows, supervisors, or bosses to discuss design and details of the report are also quality assurance. When the final report is assessed by some ‘external’ body (an invited social science lecturer, anonymous sociologist reviewer, a client, etc.), it is under quality control. Sometimes, a senior team member of a social research team providing services to a client may act as a quality controller (he/she is actually performing a quality assurance role) and ask the rest of the team to revise the product/service before submitting it to the client.
No matter what, if the client is satisfied with the product or service, quality assurance reaches its goal. In other words, having quality is equal to having client satisfaction.
