Qualitative research
This entry was originally posted on 1 July 2004 at 12:22 p.m.
Not too long ago, B's father and i were talking about quantitative versus qualitative research. I was telling him how i'm eager to get back into anthropology, where i can focus more on qualitative and narrative research. He wanted to know why i preferred it to quantitative research, and i started to explain, but the conversation kind of drifted away before i could. I've been thinking about this issue ever since.
Many social scientists like numbers. It gives us a sense of validity in the face of the clinical precision for which the hard sciences are known. Doing statistical research in the social sciences allows us to sidestep the inferiority complex we've developed as a result of years of head-scratching and scorn by both other scientists and the general populace. It's the same kind of inferiority complex that leads many of us to use obscure terminology and horrible grammar in technical journals.
All social scientists are aware of this to a greater or lesser degree, but you'll be hard-pressed to find many of us who will admit to it.
But the thing is, we don't need to feel this kind of pressure. This sense of inferiority, when you take a good look at it, is something we've brought upon ourselves in a search for validation as scientists: we're brought up to believe that science is the thing that provides us with hard, definitive answers--and human behavior, the core subject of all social sciences, is a phenomenon that defies the kind of binary pigeonholing that statistical research requires.
The hard sciences deal with some pretty abstract concepts, many of which are difficult to understand (theoretical physics is probably the most difficult discipline, by this reckoning). But when it comes down to it, all physical behavior is explicable at some level. There are extremely complex systems at work in astronomy, cosmology, geology, biology, and chemistry. But ultimately all of these things are quantifiable, and once we understand these systems and the factors that play into them, we can accurately predict their behavior.
Not so with human behavior. Despite our more predictable animal nature, we're amazingly flexible, whimsical, and varied creatures.* While our behavior does fall into clear patterns, there is enough variation that it's neither fair nor accurate to make hard and fast predictions about how a person will turn out. Think of it this way: we know how hydrogen bonds with oxygen to create water, and under which conditions this will happen, and we can predict this behavior with near 100-percent accuracy. But ask under which conditions a human child will turn out to be a bank robber, and the success of our predictions drops substantially. If we can predict human behavior even 30% of the time, it's a success from the perspective of social science.
Let's face it: when social scientists attempt to be like hard scientists, we fail miserably. It's no wonder people turn their noses up at the social sciences when our success rate--based on our self-imposed need to quantify behavior--is so dismal.
Statistics in the social sciences have their place, there's no question. We wouldn't be able to assess things like the success of new policies or rehabilitation programs without quantifiable data. But when it comes to understanding the causes of, understanding the effects of, and successfully predicting human behavior, our strengths lie in methods other than statistical analysis.
Qualia abound in human behavior. We've built our existence around them, and even though they're not truly expressible, we've spent centuries creating great works of art, literature, and music to express them. We've built wonderful organic systems around the perception, communication, and understanding of abstract notions--systems that, when quantified, lose much of their meaning. And this is where the social sciences excel.
For example, one of the best things about psychology isn't its ability to predict mental illness; it's its ability to treat it--not through quantifiable methods (though these methods should be assessed via quantifiable data in order to measure their success), but through a sort of gnostic interaction built on understanding, knowledge, and the subtle interplays of a therapeutic relationship.
As humans, we instinctively understand things on a qualitative level. We see colors, hear sounds, feel emotions, think thoughts, experience sensations, and have ideas--all of which are based on qualia. We can quantify them, as we would a suicide statistic, but in doing so, we lose a crucial piece of information: in quantifying these things, we understand how they are, but we do not capture why they are.**
Finally, there are those who would argue that all we need to know about human behavior lies within the bell curve: social sciences are probabilistic, not deterministic, and it's good enough to know what the "average person" would do. To that stance, i can only reply thus: if we, as both social scientists and humans, do not believe that we have anything to learn from qualitative research--if, in fact, we believe that the only cases that matter are those that lie along the mean, then we are dooming ourselves to academic failure. Human behavior is based as much on individual experience as it is on genetics, and because of this we will never have the level of precision in prediction as the hard sciences. In eschewing qualitative research, we deny what it is that drives us as a species, and we deny the power of insight. And once we deny the power of insight, we've lost what it means to be scientists in the first place.
*I'm sure this applies also to other animals, in varying degrees as well; we're not so special. My guess is that self-awareness and self-will have something to do with this.
**Mathematics is its own abstract realm, and this piece is not intendted as an attack on the beauty or strangeness or qualia inherent to mathematics; the author appreciates mathematics and its qualities.
Not too long ago, B's father and i were talking about quantitative versus qualitative research. I was telling him how i'm eager to get back into anthropology, where i can focus more on qualitative and narrative research. He wanted to know why i preferred it to quantitative research, and i started to explain, but the conversation kind of drifted away before i could. I've been thinking about this issue ever since.
Many social scientists like numbers. It gives us a sense of validity in the face of the clinical precision for which the hard sciences are known. Doing statistical research in the social sciences allows us to sidestep the inferiority complex we've developed as a result of years of head-scratching and scorn by both other scientists and the general populace. It's the same kind of inferiority complex that leads many of us to use obscure terminology and horrible grammar in technical journals.
All social scientists are aware of this to a greater or lesser degree, but you'll be hard-pressed to find many of us who will admit to it.
But the thing is, we don't need to feel this kind of pressure. This sense of inferiority, when you take a good look at it, is something we've brought upon ourselves in a search for validation as scientists: we're brought up to believe that science is the thing that provides us with hard, definitive answers--and human behavior, the core subject of all social sciences, is a phenomenon that defies the kind of binary pigeonholing that statistical research requires.
The hard sciences deal with some pretty abstract concepts, many of which are difficult to understand (theoretical physics is probably the most difficult discipline, by this reckoning). But when it comes down to it, all physical behavior is explicable at some level. There are extremely complex systems at work in astronomy, cosmology, geology, biology, and chemistry. But ultimately all of these things are quantifiable, and once we understand these systems and the factors that play into them, we can accurately predict their behavior.
Not so with human behavior. Despite our more predictable animal nature, we're amazingly flexible, whimsical, and varied creatures.* While our behavior does fall into clear patterns, there is enough variation that it's neither fair nor accurate to make hard and fast predictions about how a person will turn out. Think of it this way: we know how hydrogen bonds with oxygen to create water, and under which conditions this will happen, and we can predict this behavior with near 100-percent accuracy. But ask under which conditions a human child will turn out to be a bank robber, and the success of our predictions drops substantially. If we can predict human behavior even 30% of the time, it's a success from the perspective of social science.
Let's face it: when social scientists attempt to be like hard scientists, we fail miserably. It's no wonder people turn their noses up at the social sciences when our success rate--based on our self-imposed need to quantify behavior--is so dismal.
Statistics in the social sciences have their place, there's no question. We wouldn't be able to assess things like the success of new policies or rehabilitation programs without quantifiable data. But when it comes to understanding the causes of, understanding the effects of, and successfully predicting human behavior, our strengths lie in methods other than statistical analysis.
Qualia abound in human behavior. We've built our existence around them, and even though they're not truly expressible, we've spent centuries creating great works of art, literature, and music to express them. We've built wonderful organic systems around the perception, communication, and understanding of abstract notions--systems that, when quantified, lose much of their meaning. And this is where the social sciences excel.
For example, one of the best things about psychology isn't its ability to predict mental illness; it's its ability to treat it--not through quantifiable methods (though these methods should be assessed via quantifiable data in order to measure their success), but through a sort of gnostic interaction built on understanding, knowledge, and the subtle interplays of a therapeutic relationship.
As humans, we instinctively understand things on a qualitative level. We see colors, hear sounds, feel emotions, think thoughts, experience sensations, and have ideas--all of which are based on qualia. We can quantify them, as we would a suicide statistic, but in doing so, we lose a crucial piece of information: in quantifying these things, we understand how they are, but we do not capture why they are.**
Finally, there are those who would argue that all we need to know about human behavior lies within the bell curve: social sciences are probabilistic, not deterministic, and it's good enough to know what the "average person" would do. To that stance, i can only reply thus: if we, as both social scientists and humans, do not believe that we have anything to learn from qualitative research--if, in fact, we believe that the only cases that matter are those that lie along the mean, then we are dooming ourselves to academic failure. Human behavior is based as much on individual experience as it is on genetics, and because of this we will never have the level of precision in prediction as the hard sciences. In eschewing qualitative research, we deny what it is that drives us as a species, and we deny the power of insight. And once we deny the power of insight, we've lost what it means to be scientists in the first place.
*I'm sure this applies also to other animals, in varying degrees as well; we're not so special. My guess is that self-awareness and self-will have something to do with this.
**Mathematics is its own abstract realm, and this piece is not intendted as an attack on the beauty or strangeness or qualia inherent to mathematics; the author appreciates mathematics and its qualities.
posted by Circus at 2:30 PM
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