Politics of Qualitative Research

Qualitative–Quantitative Debate

At its heart, the quantitative–quantitative debate has been about different ways of seeing and approaching the social world. Those on the quantitative side for the most part have followed the Enlightenment tradition that emphasized the supremacy of rational thought and the ability of people to control both the natural and social worlds though the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge in this case meant observable facts that led the researcher to uncover general laws that could help to predict human behavior. Qualitative researchers, meanwhile, believe that it is neither possible nor desirable for researchers to stand outside of a social world of which they are necessarily part. The quest for objectivity and neutrality that is fundamental to quantitative work is all but unimportant to most qualitative researchers. Knowledge is seen as situational and provisional. Acquiring knowledge will help researchers to better understand the human condition and explain how things have developed or persisted in particular ways. Rather than seeking to find cause- and-effect relationships that might be used to predict, and perhaps control, patterns of interaction, most qualitative researchers have sought to understand the complexity of social life. Although it is certainly possible to do qualitative research from a positivist perspective, for the most part qualitative researchers have built their work on postmodern understandings of the world.

Although some have characterized the qualitative–quantitative debate as a dialogue, it might be more accurate to describe it as a struggle on the part of qualitative researchers for legitimacy and place. For years, qualitative research has suffered from accusations of being unscientific and unreliable. This criticism has meant, for example, that unlike their quantitative counterparts, qualitative researchers have routinely included sections in their articles and books justifying their methodology. By the end of the 1990s, researchers from a number of social science disciplines were proclaiming an end to the “paradigm wars,” but recent developments indicate that it is probably more accurate to say that an uneasy truce had been declared. Both qualitative and quantitative researchers seemed to have agreed that a variety of methods are required to adequately investigate the range of questions we have in relation to the social world. What was not resolved was the divergence between the epistemological positions that undergird [Page 641]the two research traditions. As the current debate over evidence-based research has shown, “scientific” inquiry continues to be portrayed as superior to “naturalistic” inquiry. In other words, the privileging of research designed to control and predict, as opposed to research that seeks to understand, remains strong in our research communities.

...