QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH DESIGN

Quantitative Research Design

Quantitative Research Design

Qualitative research methods are often mischaracterized by advocates, users, and critics alike because too often the reflexive, iterative, and flexible methods are misunderstood as 'just making do.' There is a good pragmatic tradition of "making do," from Dewey to the present, that describes the necessities as well as virtues of using what situations provide in their immediacy as the grounds of social action. While qualitative research certainly shares some of this pragmatic bricolage, good research, qualitative as well as quantitative, is designed as well as improvised. One of the merits of qualitative research is its particular openness to serendipitous invention; one of its failures, however, has been an unwillingness, or inability, on the part of its practitioners, until recently, to specify how that openness to 'what situations make available' can be both systematic and creative.

Over the years I have probably reviewed hundreds of research proposals; too large a number of these claimed that because the researcher was doing a qualitative study, the kinds of data and forms of collection could not be specified in advance. I was always a bit embarrassed by this, feeling let down by my side. It sometimes seemed as if our teaching of qualitative research was creating a mystical religion, a set of our own unexamined fetishes just at the moment we set about to identify others' taken for granted assumptions and social meanings. In this vein, some years ago I heard a colleague advise a student going out to do field work for the first time "to be like a blank slate," "just tell me everything you see and hear, write it all down." The student was completely baffled and clearly at a loss about what to do, to do first, or second, or how to begin. What would constitute telling me all you see and hear. Importantly, the student had read a lot of sociology, and knew a lot about signs and signifiers, latent as well as manifest patterns in social relations. She knew that competent social actors are not blank slates. She felt incompetent but not entirely blank. She had a project, after all.

It seemed from the proposals I read and the conversations I observed that we, qualitative sociologists, believed that we could not specify what we were going to do (i.e. lay out a design and plan of the research), because that would mean that we ...