Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

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No need to be sorry, I think you're letting your priors overwhelm your understanding of what I'm writing. What if I don't think that these methods are irredeemable or useless or epistemologically bankrupt, and STILL think that a bunch of disciplines in the social sciences over use them and could benefit from a course correction?

Does that resolve what I think you are perceiving to be a contradiction, but that I do not see as a contradiction?

Where I think you and I have a fundamental disagreement is in the nature of e.g. qualitative research methods such as case studies and whether a case study is generalizable. This feature was taught to me by... qualitative researchers. If you truly believe a case study is a generalizable research method, then either you are defining generalizability in a different way than is typical, or you hold a minority viewpoint not shared by mainline qualitative researchers.

Not all research methods need to be generalizable to have some scholarship value, and I'm not using the concept of generalizability as a colloquial stand-in for ~"bad"

BUT, I still think social sciences could use fewer qualitative studies and pure theory grounded scholarship (i.e. "a correction is warranted"). It's what I said from the start, it's what I mean now, and unless I someone provides me a compelling rationale to change my mind or the world changes, it'll probably be what I believe going forward.

It seems important to you to attribute to me a total rejection / disparagement of these methods. I am just not saying this. I do not reject these methods, just as I do not reject apple pie. I just don't think that a steady diet of apple pie is good. And I don't think the research methodology diet of many social sciences is healthy either. A correction is warranted.

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.

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