Quantitative Methods in Socio-Legal Studies: A Methodology Clinic Workbook - CSLS, University of Oxford

Abstract

What do we mean by the quantitative-qualitative research process in contemporary socio-legal empirical research? When we conduct research using experimental designs, engage with survey data, or build secondary data sets, there are often questions unanswered by quantitative data only. New research questions need to be derived, often requiring both new quantification hypotheses, or further examinations of the original measures of quantification. In particular must we always qualitatively validate the quantitative measures originally taken in legal empirical research, given that participants are qualitative end-users of the law, and given that the quantification of the law must be always qualitatively comprehensible? This seminar paper proposes that quantitative measures of the research participant's own words in legal research can tell us something new about the accuracy of the correspondence between the participant's actual reasoning on quantitative measures, to provide a measure of validation, or indeed provide a measure of accuracy assessment for an original research question, given a known theory and accepted data in a field. Given that the nature of quantification in law tends to qualify quantitative concepts in linguistic terms only, the qualitative-quantitative method may be a particularly important component to quantitative data collection in socio-legal studies. To this end this seminar paper will provide a framework for analysing these qualitative components of research participant's protocols in legal empirical research by taking an introductory tour through quantitative methodology and providing demonstrative examples. Recorded utterances and dialogue, recorded both during the research task, and retrospectively for qualitative-quantitative validation of quantification will be explicated as a workbook method for the following practical discussions: Experimental design-manipulation; Quasi-experimental design; Cross-sectional design; Longitudinal design; and Case study design.