Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Authorship
- Acknowledgements
- Finding and using the pioneers’ interviews
- Chapter 1 Introduction: the pioneers of social research study
- Voices 1 Moments of discovery
- Chapter 2 Life stories: biography and creativity
- Voices 2 Beginnings
- Chapter 3 Contexts: Empire, politics and culture
- Voices 3 Old boundaries, new thoughts
- Chapter 4 Organising: creating research worlds
- Voices 4 Old and new trends
- Chapter 5 Fighting or mixing: quantitative and qualitative research
- Voices 5 Into the field
- Chapter 6 Fieldwork: making methods
- Voices 6 On the margins
- Chapter 7 Social divisions: class, gender, ethnicity and more
- Voices 7 Reflections for the future
- Chapter 8 Conclusion: what can we learn?
- Chapter 9 Epilogue
- Notes
- Further reading
- Biographical summaries
- Index
Chapter 5 - Fighting or mixing: quantitative and qualitative research
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Authorship
- Acknowledgements
- Finding and using the pioneers’ interviews
- Chapter 1 Introduction: the pioneers of social research study
- Voices 1 Moments of discovery
- Chapter 2 Life stories: biography and creativity
- Voices 2 Beginnings
- Chapter 3 Contexts: Empire, politics and culture
- Voices 3 Old boundaries, new thoughts
- Chapter 4 Organising: creating research worlds
- Voices 4 Old and new trends
- Chapter 5 Fighting or mixing: quantitative and qualitative research
- Voices 5 Into the field
- Chapter 6 Fieldwork: making methods
- Voices 6 On the margins
- Chapter 7 Social divisions: class, gender, ethnicity and more
- Voices 7 Reflections for the future
- Chapter 8 Conclusion: what can we learn?
- Chapter 9 Epilogue
- Notes
- Further reading
- Biographical summaries
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on the age-old debate in the social sciences about the primacy of methods and the relationship of our Pioneers to one of the main ideological battles blighting disciplines such as sociology. There are a variety of methods that are used in the social sciences to uncover different questions. They can be grouped into two main strands – qualitative methods (involving participant observation, structured in-depth interviews, unstructured interviews, and focus groups) and quantitative methods (such as secondary survey data analysis, and experimental methods) with a backbone of usually inferential statistical techniques. Every researcher makes a conscious decision to adopt a method in their social enquiry and it would have been extremely unusual for the Pioneers not to engage with a sometimes oppressive responsibility to pick a ‘side’, and the dogmatic prescription to stick with it.
For some of the Pioneers, the primacy of one of the methods over the other is undoubted. As we have seen, John Goldthorpe led two of the key projects in post-war British sociology, first on the Affluent Worker and then on social mobility. He became one of the strongest supporters of quantitative methods; and homage to survey techniques underlies the active current of his interview, and indeed of his career. He argues clearly for the importance of quantification in sociology to bring the discipline to scientific rigour. John sees British sociology as weakened by the debate and the rejection of positivism. In his own words:
This so-called ‘reaction against positivism’, and then the attacks on quantitative methods, and I thought – and I still think – that was the big disaster in British sociology. I really didn't have much sympathy, or very much patience, to be honest, with the various alternatives that were floated around, ranging from phenomenology and ethnomethodology at one extreme to weird forms of structuralist Marxism, Althusser, et al – at the other. I thought that was going nowhere. (p. 25)
Importantly, John was highly aware of how his academic standpoint brought him into an ideological war with his colleagues who were less interested in quantification, and ultimately brought about isolation from British sociology.
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- Information
- Pioneering Social ResearchLife Stories of a Generation, pp. 111 - 128Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021