No excuse

This week I received a few invitations for talks that motivated me to post a reminder that Gary King et al. wrote an excellent book on doing social science a few year back: Designing Social Inquiry. Adrian Blau pointed out a serious strategic error when they wrote the book, namely that the examples they discuss in the book make it sound like only quantitative research is good research. Both quantitative and qualitative research can be systematic and scientific. So what’s the problem? — It’s research where the wrong method is used, where a regression analysis tries to illuminate the underlying processes, or when a in-depth interviews are used to quantify something. There is simply no excuse for that.