is the quant-qual fight a thing of the past?
Here’s a hypothesis I’ve had for a while. Tell me if your experience bears it out: There will always be quantitative-qualitative distinction in sociology, but the bitterness between the camps is a thing of the past. Recent PhD’s don’t seem to really care for endless fighting for the superiority of quantitative/qualitative methods.
This isn’t to say that each side doesn’t view the other with some skepticism, or that most people work on one side for a living, but the bloody arguments are over. You just don’t hear a lot of young researchers endlessly blast work done by people from the other camp. Nor are many departments hopelessly split over the issue, though you hear about them here and there. People seem to appreciate quality work done in any style. Even my own advisor, a highly regarded quantitative stratification and family researcher, supervised two dissertations with substantial qualitative components, including my own. It’s actually common now to find dissertations and books that mix methods (though it’s hard in article format).
The reason? My hunch is a cohort effect. The quant folks got a big prestige boost in the 1970s because regression was hard to do and required fancy computers. The availability of mass data sets allowed quant folks to quickly churn out a lot of good stuff. By the 1990s, any undegrad can do a regression, so it isn’t so special, unless you’re innovating a new technqiue. We’ve also had waves of good scholars in qualitative intensive areas like historical sociology and urban studies and many mix methods. So it’s a lot less likely that person trained in survey analysis will finish the PhD with a derisive attitude toward other kinds of research. Am I being a pollyanna? Or is Fabio Rojas making sense?
orgtheory.net 
i’m a complete pollyanna, but i think you’re absolutely right. i hadn’t thought about it terms of a cohort effect but the exceptions to this that i’ve heard about recently all involve older faculty members so that makes sense. this division, to me (age 30, 6 months post-PhD), has always seemed downright silly.
i’m definitely a quantitative person but my diss was mixed-method — whatever little snobbery i may have had was definitely cured by that experience (analyzing the interviews was MUCH harder and i did some pretty fancy stuff with the quantitative analysis). i tend to think if it more as a matter of taste and skill sets — the same sort of stuff that dictates what sorts of things we study.
since you mentioned it, any suggestions on mixed-methods article formats? i’m having the worst time trying to include both methods in an article and i’m not a book person. i think this is a big (and unfortunate) barrier to the mix method thing.
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newsocprof
March 27, 2008 at 4:28 am
I just had a research seminar today where one of the profs said that KKV is old hat and that qualitative research can be well defended against attacks from the quant lords. Mind you, we are polisci people, but the fights of the 90’s seem to be over. Alas, I fear the residue remains in some profs’ minds.
That said, don’t know much about sociology.
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richardpointer
March 27, 2008 at 5:16 am
Nor do I know much about sociology, but fairly recent experience among young-ish researchers seems to support your point. The biggest surprise to me were the young-uns who were being rigidly quantitative. It seemed so… old school. The much more heated discussions were around the generalizability and the relationship between theory and practice, but our behaviorally-oriented discipline cultivates precisely that sort of argument. Seems odd to me, actually, that quant is as underrepresented as it is among us given the tools and access available.
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J.Lo
March 27, 2008 at 8:15 am
I entirely agree with the assessment that the qualitative/quantitative division is a thing of the past. This comes out clearly in Guetzkow, Lamont and Mallard’s (2004) research on NSF panelists’ definition of what constitutes “good research” (which I think is pretty much the same one that is used by AJS and ASR reviewers). The main finding there is that the the definition is broad and generalized (favoring innovative “approaches” and theoretical takes) and therefore it transcends the quantitative/qualitative divide as traditionally conceived.
I also have a more knowledge-political take on this issue. It goes back to my sense of where we are as a discipline in terms of our standards of valuation. This can be summarized with the slogan (printable on a t-shirt): “we are all Mertonians now.” In this sense the qual/quant divide was a Midwestern spat that appeared to reflect the entire discipline simply because of the bully-pulpit provided by AJS and Chicago sociology. So while Blumer (1956) was decrying “variables sociology” (by which he meant “that complicated stuff with computers and such that they do at Madison and Ann Arbor”), Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld were quietly mentoring the next generation of great (organizational!) sociologists (Gouldner, Blau, Meyer, etc.) in a manner that defined quality of research beyond methodological lines (i.e. Blau’s Patterns of Bureacracy is a great example of a multi-method diss).
So while the Midwestern departments were shouting at one another about qualitative versus quantitative (a more recent version of which is Abbott’s (1988) article on “general linear reality”) in their battle for turf (and Parsons was building castles in the sky at Cambridge) it was ultimately Columbia who won the day by coming up with a definition of good research that transcended methodological boundaries. So today’s model scholar is neither Blumer nor Otis Dudley Duncan, but Art Stinchcombe.
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Omar
March 27, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Newsocprof, sadly mixed methods are extremely rare in soc articles, though I might suggest reading the journal Social Science History.
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fabiorojas
March 27, 2008 at 2:57 pm
I think there may be more of a divide than you think Fabio. The divide tends not to play out in the journals though or even in the top departments. Younger folks (assistants and grad students) have been socialized to appreciate diverse methods and we just don’t see a divide as much as the older generation does. But the divide still exists, particularly in departments that don’t have elite status. I think the divide is the most contested/heated in departments in non-R1 schools where many of the people are out of touch with the discipline. In those departments, methods training (their particular sort) is held like a badge of honor.
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brayden
March 28, 2008 at 3:17 pm
At UCLA I studied quantitative analysis. But my dissertation and my most important (in my mind) work is qualitative. There is still a lot of resistance to qualitative work. It depends a great deal on where and how one is trained. I’ve presented at quite a few places and have gotten very mixed responses. Steve Postrel and I presented a paper at the Wharton Tech conference a few years ago and were very well received (Steve is a much better presenter than I am). But, we still get a lot of “you can’t tell anything from an n of 1” comments. I am not a sociologist. My major was strategy and organization. There were plenty of sociologists around (Ouchi (yes Ouchi has a Ph.D. in sociology, ask Peter Blau), Zucker, …).
My thinking is framed in terms of what people do and how they perceive things. And I am more satisfied by getting original data. I read Spradley when I was taking graduate courses at UT Austin (a great class w/ Jan Beyer). I’ve read quite a bit of anthropology over the years. So, my data collection methods are mostly influenced by anthropologists.
It’s kind of funny because I took a good deal of psychometrics at UCLA (Bentler). So, I can evaluate it pretty well. I just am not inspired to do it.
Oh well.
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David Hoopes
March 31, 2008 at 4:04 am
As starting a fight is a good way to make a name for yourself, and reviving an old fight is even better (you know old stuff, which means you’re smart, plust there are established interested parties) I plan on reviving the fight ASAP. Thanks for the idea!
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shakha
April 1, 2008 at 1:23 am
Nice thought Shakha. There a few scholars out there who only get cited because they get everyone so mad. I won’t mention names. You might want to take an irrational stance that will anger the most people. After you’re a household name you can say, “I’m sorry.” Good luck.
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David Hoopes
April 2, 2008 at 6:07 pm
[…] but this is simply not an accurate portrayal of modern sociology. As I’ve argued before, the quantitative-qualitative split is a thing of the past. I myself have actually published articles in multiple genres, such as ethnography, archival work, […]
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sudhir, chillax « orgtheory.net
April 19, 2011 at 3:11 am