Numbers can be enriching

Abstract

Numbers are words with distinctive properties that give them a special and important place in scholarly discourse in psychology. Among these are the ability to say the same thing to everybody, the stability of their meaning across time, and their manipulability. These properties make quantitative methods valuable tools in enriching research (research aimed at giving people a deeper, broader, more profound appreciation of the phenomenon) as well as in theory-building research (research aimed at improving a unified and coherent understanding). These views seem compatible with those advanced by Westerman [Westerman, M.A., 2006. Quantitative research as an interpretive enterprise: The mostly unacknowledged role of interpretation in research efforts and suggestions for explicitly interpretive quantitative investigations. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 189–211] and Yanchar [Yanchar, S.C., 2006. On the possibility of contextual-quantitative inquiry. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 212–228].