Introduction: Rethinking Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Abstract

This article introduces the symposium issue on `Narrative, Numbers and Socio-Cultural Change'.The articles were all papers presented initially at the conference `Narrative, Numbers and Social Change' at the University of Manchester, UK in November 2007.The conference was organized through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). Methodological issues have been central to CRESC since its inception, and the Centre has an ongoing commitment to nurturing methodological expertise and innovation in the study of socio-cultural change. This particular event marked an interest in rethinking the boundaries of qualitative and quantitative research and in developing methods adequate to the challenges posed by socio-cultural complexity, in ways which involve reworking some of the conventional understandings of the relationships between the empirical, the theoretical and methodology. The introduction reviews the articles and reflects on their significance in the context of understandings of methods in cultural sociology and the sociology of culture, in the UK and beyond.

Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena: ethnomethodology and the question of ‘method’ in the social sciences

“…In treating methods as social and cultural phenomena in and of themselves, with their own biographies and ‘personal’ entanglements – as in discussions of the history of the survey, the interview, the focus group, and so on – we see a danger that the recent ‘empirical studies’ of social science methods may encourage ‘methodological hagiography’, with the history of social science rewritten, no longer as the lives of ‘great men’, but as the lives of ‘great methods’ (whether heroic, villainous or otherwise, see e.g. Law ; Majima and Moore ; Law, Ruppert and Savage ; Savage ). The examples we have chosen to examine in this article allow us to see why granting autonomy to method, a contemporary reworking of the mythological conception of the methodology of the social sciences (with the focus not on the significance of the researcher but the techniques they employ), is liable to end up in confusion.…”

“…It would be misleading to construe these as signifying a problematic introversion, indicative of malaise, paralysis or crisis (though an element of this is perhaps in play, see Savage and Burrows ). Not only does this work reflect growing interest in practices and techniques of knowledge‐making in social and cultural life more broadly, and not just science and administration (see Majima and Moore ; Benzecry and Krause ), it also reflects dissatisfaction with programmatic doctrinal statements of the aims of the social sciences wedded to meta‐reflection, critique and inter‐ and intra‐disciplinary jostling and one‐upmanship. Rather than using idealized conceptions of social science as decontextualized standards to judge what social scientists do, the focus has been on understanding the scale, range and diversity of the social sciences practical entanglements in social and cultural life, showing that the social sciences do not merely record, but are productive, helping to bring into being and stabilize the very phenomena they depict, thereby establishing open‐ended, co‐constitutive, reflexive and recursive relationships between what is studied and how (Lury and Wakeford ).…”

Musical Relationships: Intersections of Race, Gender, Genre, and Listening Situation

“…less costly and more sophisticated’ (Majima and Moore, 2009: 204) by showing how open-ended survey questions about favorite artists and genres in various situations improve upon the analysis of genre ratings. A second goal of this study is to analyze this data through a ‘complex interplay of numbers and narrative’ (Majima and Moore, 2009: 205), constructing a formal map of the musical field and using individual musical profiles to interpret bridging and bounding processes. Drawing on elements of social network analysis, correspondence analysis, and comparative methods, this framework enables the simultaneous study of macro-patterns and micro-processes, building on affinities between relational and interpretive analyses of culture.…”

Statistical Practice: Putting Society on Display

“…Stemming from a growing interest in the 'social life of method' (Law et al, 2011;Savage, 2013; and for a more general overview see Mair et al, 2013), studies of the emergence, contestation, stabilization, proliferation and collapse of new methods and their diverse social, cultural and political implications have been used to challenge a series of methodological orthodoxies allegedly definitive of the social sciences since the mid-20th century (Savage and Burrows, 2007). The 'qualitativequantitative divide' has become a principal target (see Majima and Moore, 2009;Adkins and Lury, 2012). Though it served as a significant line of demarcation in the geography of the social sciences, the qualitative-quantitative divide is now seen less as a technical distinction and more as a moral and political one, exerting a pervasive and enduring influence on the 'imaginaries' of the social sciences -something contemporary empirical work on method seeks to 'unsettle' and 'disturb' (Majima and Moore, 2009).…”

“…Nonetheless, no matter how diversified the reasons for the critique, there are commonalities in the positions advanced. Those arguing for a rethink hold: (a) that allowing researchers to identify themselves in binary terms as either qualitative or quantitative, and specialize in one 'kind' of technique, is counter-productive, encouraging the subordination of phenomena of interest to the methods used to study them, thereby making the social sciences more rigid and dogmatic, less flexible and responsive (see, e.g., Majima and Moore, 2009;Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2010;Gane, 2012); (b) that describing researchers as qualitative or quantitative does not describe their actual practices -research does not neatly break into 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' work (see, e.g., Majima and Moore, 2009;Latour, 2010;Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2010;Gane, 2012); and (c) that describing researchers as qualitative or quantitative does not describe the materials they work with -the qualitative-quantitative distinction does not carve 'the empirical' at the joints, it does not neatly separate quantities and qualities, meaning that the quantitative-qualitative divide is an artificial and unhelpful dichotomy imposed upon the phenomena researchers are seeking to make sense of (see, e.g., Kuhn, 1977;Latour, 2010;Gane, 2012). Gane usefully summarizes the discontent: 'a[ny] discipline dominated by stock quantitative and qualitative methods is a discipline not only lacking in imagination, but also one that in spite of its claims can never be empirical in any meaningful sense ' (2012: 159).…”