Anthony Giddens - Essential Concepts in Sociology

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A basic distinction between those approaches to research that look for indepth knowledge by tapping into the subject’s reasoning and decision-making processes (qualitative) and those that make extensive use of measurement to quantify social phenomena (quantitative).

Quantitative research was central to sociology from the discipline’s inception. Durkheim’s use of official statistics to quantify suicide rates and make comparisons across societies is typical of the kind of technique sociologists adopted. Given the desire in the nineteenth century to establish sociology as the ‘ scienceof society’, it is not surprising that sociologists turned to quantitative methods, which held out the promise of accurate and reliable measurement. Such methods also offered the potential for comparative and historical studies which could yield insights into the extent of social changes, both geographically and over time.

Qualitative research began as a more specialized form, acting as a kind of under-labourer to supposedly more significant, large-scale quantitative studies. Qualitative work was often seen as an important prerequisite which took the form of small pilot studies aimed at clarifying meanings. From the 1970s, though, this situation began to change, and qualitative research gradually came to be seen as a method of inquiry in its own right. For a growing number of sociologists today, qualitative research is actually superior to quantitative methods, being a more appropriate, object-adequate type for the study of human beings and social life.

Quantitative studies typically produce numerical information in the form of, say, numbers or percentages, in order to assess the size of a social problem or the percentage of a given population sharing similar attitudes. Descriptive statistical information is extremely useful in helping us to create an accurate picture of society. What proportion of the population is working class? What is the proportion of married women in paid employment? How many people believe that global warming is real? All these questions demand quantitative research, which is typically carried out by selecting a representative population sample from which general conclusions can be drawn. Quantitative samples tend to be much larger than those used in qualitative research in order to enable statistical testing.

Quantitative methods can be taken a stage further using inferential statistical analysis, which tries to arrive at general conclusions about data – for example, on the probability that an identified difference between groups within a sample is reliable and has not occurred simply by chance. Inferential statistics are widely used in variable analysis, when sociologists try to pick their way through several variables that are found to be correlated in order to establish relationships of cause and effect. This has been made somewhat easier over recent years with the advent of computer-based software programs such as the ubiquitous SPSS, which simplify the manipulation of raw data and enable automated calculations. Ironically, perhaps, this development has coincided with a turn towards qualitative methods in sociology.

Qualitative research includes all of the following methods: focus groups, ethnography, semi-structured or unstructured questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, participant observation, biographical research, oral histories, narrative studies, grounded theory and life histories. In all of these, sociologists try to understand how social life is lived and how people interpret and make sense of their social position. In short, the aim is to tap into the quality of people’s social lives, not to measure the shape and size of society as a whole. One area in which qualitative inquiry has had success is in giving a voice to under-represented or disadvantaged social groups. Studies of homelessness, self-harm, domestic violence, children’s experiences and many more have benefited enormously from qualitative research methods designed to allow marginalized groups to speak freely.

One further benefit of qualitative methods is the possibility of enhancing the validity of research conclusions. Within interviews or ethnographies, researchers can tell participants how they are interpreting their responses and ask if that understanding is correct. After interview, a debriefing session can be held which allows any possible misunderstandings to be ironed out. In the approach known as grounded theory, the traditional deductive method involving the construction of hypotheses which are then empirically tested is turned on its head, as researchers collect data in the form of interview transcripts before exploring these in systematic ways, using sorting, coding and categorizing, before moving on to the creation of concepts and theories which are said to ‘emerge’ from the data. All of these interactions mean the involvement of research participants in the research process rather than maintaining a strict division between researcher and subject.

The increasing use of qualitative research methods has produced many useful and insightful studies, but some sociologists are concerned that quantitative methods may be falling out of favour. In a national survey of British sociology students’ attitudes to quantitative methods, Williams et al. (2008) found that many students had anxieties about working with numbers and learning statistical techniques. More worrying is that a majority of the authors’ sample just had little or no interest in quantitative methods because their perception of sociology was of a discipline that lies closer to the humanities than to the sciences. This apparent generational shift in attitudes may pose a danger to the status of sociology as a scientific discipline and consequently to its funding streams and, ultimately, student recruitment.

In spite of the apparently clear distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods, some sociologists argue that the divide is not as firm as previously thought. Some qualitative methods also involve numerical measurement and, conversely, some ostensibly quantitative methods analyse meaningful statements (Bryman 2015). Qualitative researchers use software packages to analyse large amounts of text and interview material by codifying, categorizing and quantifying it, while some quantitative studies are conducted via semi-structured interviews that allow participants to go beyond the fixed frame of researchers’ questionnaires. Survey research is also interested in people’s attitudes and opinions, which suggests a concern with meanings and interpretation, while the conclusions drawn in many observational studies of social interactionimplicitly assume a more general application.

Some qualitative researchers take the view that measurement and statistical testing are not appropriate for the study of meaning-making humans, while some quantitative researchers see many of the methods adopted by qualitative sociologists as too subjective to be reliable and hopelessly individualistic. But an increasing number of projects now adopt ‘mixed-methods’ approaches, which use both quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings that are consistent across quantitative and qualitative methods are likely to be more valid and reliable than those arrived at using just one. In mixed-methods studies, the choice of research method tends to be driven by research questions and practical considerations. A good example of the productive use of mixed methods can be found in the study of cultural capital and social exclusion over a three-year period (2003–6) by Silva and her colleagues (2009). The project made use of a survey, household interviews and focus groups, thus mixing quantitative with qualitative methods. The authors describe their approach as ‘methodological eclecticism’, arguing that this not only allows a way of corroborating facts but also enables the plausibility of interpretations to be checked.