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31 Mar 09
Terra Nova: How Online Communities and Flawed Reasoning Sound a Death Knell for Qualitative Methods
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So here is the prediction:
Enterprising young scholars who are interested in cultural anthropology and are also trained in statistical methods are going to draw out testable predictions from the body of existing qualitative work, and test those predictions by applying experimental or econometric methods to data extracted from virtual worlds and social media. They will garner funding and publicity in the areas where they compete head to head with qualitative researchers, and the latter will be forced to defend their methods and conclusions. Some schools will conclude that they can make a bigger impact in the field by hiring faculty trained in these methods. Several decades later, the top departments and journals studying the ideas of cultural anthropology will be dominated by quantitative methods. Qualitative methods will either be relegated to less-prestigious schools and special-interest journals in cultural anthropology, or else cultural anthropology will decline in influence relative to other departments (like psychology) that embrace quantitative methods to study similar questions. -
Having thought more about this since the panel, I am concluding that quantitative research drives out qualitative research in a two-stage process. In cases when quantitative and qualitative methods go head to head--where the same research question is amenable to both methods--the quantitative researchers have a real advantage in persuading skeptics, getting funding and influence.
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