Why quantitative vs qualitative debate turns into a holy war?
Last week turned into big grooming of WUD Silesia agenda for us. Working on the content and main flow of the conference is quite a responsibility. Our preparation always emerges very interesting discussions - thinking about a variety of perspectives that we invite to present during our conference stimulates us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on possible answers.
In this context, we started to talk about the subject which - from my experience - often brings some kind of polarizations of debaters. Yes, quantitative vs qualitative approach in research - if you landed here to read this article it’s highly probable that you had at least once the opportunity to participate in such a discussion. Was it intense? When it comes to social sciences it mostly is...
I observe that such a discussions dynamics depends on environment which it refers to (scientific, business or public). Our last discussion was quite calm and factual - me and Agata has many experiences in argumentation connected with picking up right methods - but when we drifted to business area it started to be difficult to maintain objectivity. That’s why I started reflect deeper on causes of this “holy wars” which come down to argues which data are more valuable and which insights is profitable to use in projects.
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We always care about the appearance of research perspective among every WUD Silesia edition. This time we started to wonder who could present a case of unexpected outcomes of research - a researcher specialized in quantitative studies or this one specialized in qualitative collecting and analysing data. So at this point, we had begun. It’s worth to notice, that the type of question which we had asked brought important assumptions and from the very beginning of our discussion, we settled down divisions between researchers and existence of “ quantitative/qualitative specializations”.
Consequently, the first thing which exposed in our conversation was connected strictly with personas of researchers. Undoubtedly, one of the central problems of the methodology is how researcher persona (personality, cognitive processes, emotional relation with research object) influence over a course and conclusions of the particular study process. In the debate which interesting us, we should focus especially on researcher abilities and preferences. So - is it true that some of us just prefer to choose methods typical for one of the approach? From my perspective, the answer is: yes, it is and we should contemplate what impact it has on the research project.
It’s quite obvious that the situation when someone is imposing his/her perspective on research brings the high risk of errors; it doesn’t matter is it researcher in him/herself or is it one of a stakeholders - when core argumentation toward modeling research process is based on someone's preferences, it's more than sure that validity of a research will suffer from that. Why? As Kevin Durrheim pointed out in the book: “Research in Practice: Applied Methods for the Social Sciences” - in research design we have to aim coherence between 4 dimensions: purpose, context, techniques and paradigms. When one of this elements is inadequate (for example decisions about techniques is based on researcher’s personal convictions instead of context and purpose requirements) there is a high risk that research process won’t answer research questions.
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Based on:
M. T. Blanche, M. J. Terre Blanche, K. Durrheim, D. Painter, “Research in Practice: Applied Methods for the Social Sciences”, Juta and Company Ltd, 2006, s. 37
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There's a nice and neat clue there for the future discussions. When the debate on research approach starts to be fierce (“Only hard data are valuable!” “Let’s talk with real people!”) - we should ask ourselves: could it be that someone's preferences determine what is set as valuable in research process?
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I could recall many cases where the whole discussion was concentrated not on conditions and requirements but only on features of quantitative or qualitative methods. It led to searching arguments inside the methods, instead of looking at the traits of a phenomenon which we want to study.
Once I had occasion to participate in a meeting on very early, initial stage of the project for the redesigning of a popular Polish web portal (it was actually still the process of sale). User research was offered as an approach tailored to project requirements. Due to the fact that this web portal business model was strongly based on web analytics and data provided by many surveys conducted on current users - we proposed to complete knowledge about users needs with qualitative data: client wanted to identify their behavioral patterns in searching specific information (in wide perspective - not only in searching the Internet). We have reasoned for the use of IDI (in-depth-interviews) or organize Focus Group Interviews to explore dependence of tools being used and actual objects of search - we pointed possibilities of deepening threads in conversation and observe real actions of users. Unfortunately client behalfs anchored themselves on features of methods and responded to us with best known to them information - advantages of quantitative methods… Instantly our discussion turned around, we slipped on arguing “which data are better” and disconnecting from the project goals. This discussion didn’t finish with consensus...
Referring to that case (and many other similar situations which I experienced) I think that we are approaching here to another aspect of background of quantitative vs qualitative “holy wars” - mostly we start with thinking about characteristics of methods, their capabilities and limitations; in terms of the research context, we should ask ourselves: “WHAT are we trying to understand?” and enrich it with WHY are we trying to understand it, to make sure that our questions are thrown in the right direction. A separate thread (which we surely will continue on this blog) is how to prepare for such a confrontation, especially in environment which is strongly focused on one approach or methods proven in the past. This post only opens discussion - we invite you to take the floor!
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Concluding above considerations it’s worth to point out that in every current social sciences methodology manual you will find instructions that both - qualitative and quantitative - approach to research is valuable in specific conditions; furthermore - we should use both of them to describe complex social and psychological phenomenons. It’s even advisable to use mixed methods research designs, what is fresh paradigm in social sciences but bringing many advantages.
As Static Solutions founders nicely put it:
“Systematically collected, saturated qualitative data provide a degree of insight into complex phenomenon that differs dramatically from what is provided through quantitative analysis, and both approaches should be valued for the unique contributions they make in research.”
Author: Kasia
Bibliography and references:
M. T. Blanche, M. J. Terre Blanche, K. Durrheim, D. Painter, “Research in Practice: Applied Methods for the Social Sciences”, Juta and Company Ltd, 2006
J. Brzeziński “Metodologia badań psychologicznych, PWN, 2005
http://www.statisticssolutions.com/qualitative-research-approach/
http://wilderdom.com/research/QualitativeVersusQuantitativeResearch.html
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11135-007-9105-3
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