Quantitative versus Qualitative Methods

Debate Positions

While there have been many attempts to shed light on this persistent division in the social sciences, work on this question is generated primarily by writers who occupy one of the two camps. These [Page 2190]writers tend to be either strong partisans or visceral opponents of the quantitative worldview. A chronic dualism besets many of these debates, in large part because the distinction between quantitative and qualitative forms of descriptive and causal inference has been folded into the much larger and more “philosophical” debate between positivism and interpretivism. Positivists (or naturalists), usually identified with quantitative methods, present their perspective as hegemonic: There is, or ought to be, only one logic of inference. The conclusion of these scholars is that either there are no important distinctions between qualitative and quantitative work or, to the extent that such distinctions exist, they are to the detriment of qualitative scholarship. “When possible, quantify” is the motto of this camp. Where quantification is not possible, this camp encourages qualitative scholars to follow the logic of quantitative reasoning. Defenders of qualitative work typically emphasize the limits of quantification and the insights that can be gained through an interpretive approach to social action. Rather than a unified logic, interpretivists suggest that there might be multiple logics at work in the social sciences. These multiple logics stem from epistemological or ontological commitments, which may themselves be culturally prescribed and political or historical in origin.

A third position runs orthogonal to this debate. According to this view, the qualitative/quantitative division is inherently ambiguous and, hence, a distraction from the real work of social science. In this spirit, a recent lexicon focused on qualitative inquiry notes, in the entry for “Qualitative,” that “the adjective does not clearly signal a particular meaning” (Thomas A. Schwandt, 1997, p. 129). Rather, it is used as a “blanket designation for all forms of [hermeneutic] inquiry including ethnography, case study research, naturalistic inquiry, ethnomethodology, life history methodology, narrative inquiry, and the like.” In sum, concludes the author of this dictionary of qualitative methods (with no apparent sense of irony), “‘qualitative research’ is simply not a very useful term for denoting a specific set of characteristics of inquiry” (Schwandt, 1997, p. 130). The inherent fuzziness of the concepts “qualitative” and “quantitative” thus prompts some scholars to argue that the so-called debate must be a red herring, that is, a distraction from the real issues of social science methodology.

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