Simple Bayesian Inference for Qualitative Political Research

Abstract

In political science and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, there exists an unfortunate de facto divide between qualitative and quantitative empirical research. Sometimes this divide is purely a function of training and disciplinary socialization, but often it reflects a valid dispute over the philosophical foundations of inquiry. I argue here that the Bayesian approach to quantitative empirical modeling is an amenable starting point for building a rapprochement between qualitative and quantitative research, and I introduce as an example a straightforward model that allows for the Bayesian estimation of the difference between means of very small samples with unknown and possibly unequal variances. I then extend this approach to consider nonnormal variates, informative priors, and a multivariate test of the difference of means useful for the researcher who is interested in determining whether two small samples are different on several dimensions simultaneously.