1/ If you are: 1) Naturally (i.e. biographically) qualitatively-minded like I am; and, 2) Skeptical of (i.e. derisive towards) qualitative methods like I was; you should really spend some time thinking about causality.
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2/ Quantitive methods AND MOST randomized experiments used to study complex systems (like society and culture) place all of their attentive mass on the search for events which produce sudden, dramatic, and *MEASURABLE* changes.
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3/ That's a problem because those events need not exist and even when they do they may not describe the bulk of the process which, chained together, AFFORDS the change. Worse, the desperate search tends to exclude obvious causal elements irreducible to discrete events.
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4/ Processes matter. And, processes are hard to measure in open and UNCLOSABLE systems. Qualitative methods and scholarship are very good at identifying (often immeasurable) components of and actors in a system.
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5/ In quantitive (information retrieval) terms, such qualitative methods may have lower precision than quantitive methods (albeit not always); but, it also has higher recall. And, for complex systems, recall – good coverage over the set components and actors – is very important.
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Replying to @generativist
Although most of my training was in quantitative methods, particularly econometrics, I’ve been a proponent of and user of mixed methods for awhile. These should complement each other.
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Absolutely.
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