Bridging the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide in Political Science

Abstract

In Designing Social Inquiry, Gary King, Bob Keohane and Sidney Verba (KKV) have performed real service to researchers. I, for one, will not complain if I never again have to look into the uncomprehending eyes of first-year graduate students when I enjoin them (pace Przeworski and Teune) to turn proper names into variables. The book is brief and lucidly argued and avoids the weighty, musclebound pronouncements that are often studded onto the pages of methodological manuals. But following KKV's injunction that a slightly more complicated theory will explain vastly more of the world (p. 105), I will praise them no more but focus on an important weakness in the book. Their central argument is that the same logic that is explicated and formalized clearly in discussions of quantitative research methods underlies-or should-the best research (p. 4). If this is so, then they really ought to have paid more attention to the relations between quantitative and approaches and what rigorous use of the latter can offer quantifiers. But while they offer good deal of generous (at times patronizing) advice to qualitatively oriented scholars, they say very little about how approaches can be combined with quantitative research. Especially with the growth of choicetheoretic approaches, whose users often illustrate their theories with stories, there is need for set of ground rules on how to make intelligent use of data. KKV do not address this issue. Rather, they use the model of quantitative research to advise researchers on how best to approximate good models of descriptive and causal inference. (Increasing the number of observations is their cardinal operational rule.) But in today's social science world, how many social scientists can be simply labeled qualitative or -quantitative? How often, for example, do we find support for sophisticated game-theoretic models resting on the use of anecdotal reports or on secondary evidence lifted from one or two sources? More and more frequently in today's social science practice, quantitative and data are interlarded within the same study. A recent work that KKV warmly praise illustrates both that their distinction between quantitative and researchers is too schematic and that we need to think more seriously about the interaction of the two kinds of data.