In Defense of Qualitative Research Methods
In science, there seems to be an underlying goal of quantifying everything. We hope that our theories and hypotheses can be mathematically verified or statistically significant. Undergirding this is a kind of modernist idealism, the hope that we as humanity can discover ultimate, unchangeable truths. What can be more enduring and unchanging than mathematical equations? A perfect triangle will forever be a perfect triangle and 2 plus 2 will always equal 4. This is irrefutable in the eye of the mathematician; it is the allure of certain knowledge. It is this certainty which seems to present itself as the ultimate goal of the sciences. This is a very Platonic way of understanding things, the idea that we can discover through our particular methods a kind of universal, unalterable truth about the nature of reality. Is everything quantifiable? This is the first assumption that must be questioned as we make room for other methods of inquiry and understa...