Hmm, alright, sure: Pick a field. What would the shift you are proposing look like in that field? What’s the ratio now between qualitative work and quantitative work, and what ratio would you like it to be, post-correction?
What will be the outcome of that shift? Some kind of better research?
On what basis do you think that field should agree with your perception?
On what basis do you think your perception is correct?
Note that I’m using “qualitative” and “quantitative” as stand-ins for whatever you think there’s too much of and too little of, respectively—please feel free to clarify if these words don’t effectively capture what you are trying to say.
It’s not at all important to me to attribute to you a “total rejection” of these methods, your writing implies to me that you have a preference for quant methods and think they’re better. You’re not, for example, complaining about too much quant methodology in economics, and too little qualitative. Sure, you don’t think that qual methods are bad per se, but you do think that the social sciences could use fewer of them, and that they’re overused.
I imagine you would agree that these methods can tell us different things, and that they’re not interchangeable for any given research question. You’d probably also agree that some fields bias towards certain types of questions, and that maybe the ratio of methods of work in a given field reflects the bias towards questions that are best answered by those methods. So, are you suggesting that entire fields should focus more on different questions, specifically those that can be answered quantitatively?
If not, I’m not sure I understand what the implications of your argument are.
For what it’s worth, here’s my bias: I am both a quantitative and a qualitative researcher, and I actually think the underlying issues holding back the production of generalizable knowledge have little to do with choice of methodology, and to the extent that they do, it’s in part due to a fetishization of quantitative methods that tell us something generalizable—but not necessarily something useful or even something true.
What will be the outcome of that shift? Some kind of better research?
On what basis do you think that field should agree with your perception?
On what basis do you think your perception is correct?
Note that I’m using “qualitative” and “quantitative” as stand-ins for whatever you think there’s too much of and too little of, respectively—please feel free to clarify if these words don’t effectively capture what you are trying to say.
It’s not at all important to me to attribute to you a “total rejection” of these methods, your writing implies to me that you have a preference for quant methods and think they’re better. You’re not, for example, complaining about too much quant methodology in economics, and too little qualitative. Sure, you don’t think that qual methods are bad per se, but you do think that the social sciences could use fewer of them, and that they’re overused.
I imagine you would agree that these methods can tell us different things, and that they’re not interchangeable for any given research question. You’d probably also agree that some fields bias towards certain types of questions, and that maybe the ratio of methods of work in a given field reflects the bias towards questions that are best answered by those methods. So, are you suggesting that entire fields should focus more on different questions, specifically those that can be answered quantitatively?
If not, I’m not sure I understand what the implications of your argument are.
For what it’s worth, here’s my bias: I am both a quantitative and a qualitative researcher, and I actually think the underlying issues holding back the production of generalizable knowledge have little to do with choice of methodology, and to the extent that they do, it’s in part due to a fetishization of quantitative methods that tell us something generalizable—but not necessarily something useful or even something true.