Friday, 3 June 2011
Why a blog entitled "Qualitative research is rubbish"?
This is a (provocatively-titled) blog intended to provide a critique of poor qualitative research methods, so that researchers interested in subjective and idiosyncratic experience can conduct better studies using these methods. In my searching of the academic literatures, I find that whilst quantitative research is subject to fierce peer review, and is also subject to criticisms from qualitative researchers, qualitative and critical psychology is far less critically evaluated by it's own proponents, and positively hostile to critique from quantitative researchers. Students appear to choose to do qualitative projects because they are anxious about statistics, not appreciating how complicated and demanding good qualitative work is. Researchers want the freedom to move beyond sampling, control groups, reliability, validity, and narrow a priori hypotheses, and to focus in individuals, rejecting the idea of generalisation of findings. Anyone interested in psychological questions has to consider subjectivity within what they do. I believe that understanding human subjectivity is too important to be frittered away in what Sokal and Bricmont called "fashionable nonsense", and would like to see some debate here - not just "yah-booing" from either side. We might all even learn something. Let the debate begin!
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