International Journal of Value-Based Management 14: 110, 2001.

1
2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Quantitative and Qualitative Research: An Analysis

JOHN B. WILSON 1 & SAMUEL M. NATALE 1, 2

1 Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford, England; 2 Adelphi University,
Garden City, New York and Senior Research Associate, Department of Educational Studies,
University of Oxford, England

Abstract. It is widely believed that there is a clear distinction between quantitative and
qualitative research, and these embedded or institutionalised terms profoundly affect the
practice of such research. In this article the clarity and/or usefulness of the distinction is
challenged together with the whole idea that there are given methodologies for research.
Almost everything turns on conceptual clarity in relation to the initial research-questions: that
leads the research to methods which follow logically from the concepts involved. The alleged
quantitative/qualitative distinction does no more than pre-empt methods and procedures of
research which should be left open.

Keywords: research methods, analysis, measurement, quantification, clarification

Many researchers may believe themselves to be unclear about the distinction

between quantitative and qualitative research; but most believe that these
terms do mark some clear distinction clear enough, at least, for some prac-
tical purposes even if they do not make use of it in their own research. We
deny this, but we think that the attempt to make, and institutionalise, some
distinction under these headings continues profoundly to influence research;
so that it is important to work through some of the considerations that arise in
trying to make sense of them. We make no apology for an untidy or piecemeal
approach; that is essential for the working through, and sheds some light on
the nature of research in general.
To go through all or even most of what has been written by way of
definition, or even description, on quantitative and qualitative research would
require a whole book in itself. We shall quote from one popular work only
(Creswell, 1994). (The reader will find similar accounts in other books: see
references below.) In this book, which is written for (and dedicated to) re-
search students and young researchers, the reader is told first to focus his
study that is, roughly to get a fair idea of what topic he wants to research
(pp. 23); and then (p. 4ff.) to
2 JOHN B. WILSON AND SAMUEL M. NATALE

select an overall paradigm for the study. I present two choices the
qualitative and the quantitative that have roots in 20th-century philo-
sophical thinking. The quantitative is termed [sic] the traditional, the
positivist, the experimental, or the empiricist paradigm . . . . The qual-
itative paradigm is termed the constructivist approach or naturalistic
(Lincoln and Guba, 1985), the interpretative approach (Smith, 1983),
or the postpositivist or postmodern perspective (Quantz, 1992).
There are then a few breezy pages in which these philosophies are described
in terms of their ontology and epistemology and a new one on us
rhetoric
. . . rhetoric, or language of the research. When a quantitative researcher
writes a study, the language should be not only impersonal and formal
but also based on accepted words such as relationship, comparison,
and within-group. . . (p. 6).
Some may find this hard to take seriously, but it is of course serious and
worth quoting as an example of what may happen when a distinction (if
there is a distinction) is marked by terms whose meaning is not clear to us.
They become in effect titles for different paradigms, almost ideologies or
religions, which are supposed to have their own rhetoric and philosophical
foundations. This is an extreme case; most of us would perhaps discount
it, but still feel that the distinction is important and that it has some kind of
intuitive validity. Perhaps we feel that there is some kind of rough work-
ing definition which is useful to researchers and research students. Almost
certainly we shall have the idea that the distinction is about whether we use
numbers or quantities and perhaps some kind of statistics on the one hand
(quantitative), or on the other hand methods and procedures which do not
involve numbers but some other kind of approach (qualitative). But as soon
as we start to think seriously about this, things at once become much more
uncertain, and we may come to have doubts about the distinction as a whole.
In ordinary English we distinguish between quantity and quality: we ask
how big an army is, how many members it has, and then we ask what sort of
people they are. The first half of this distinction (the quantity) is ambiguous
as to whether we use numbers or not we may say, It is only a small army or
It is a vast horde, that is certainly a judgement of quantity: we do not have
to say, It contains 1,500,000 men. That already puts in question the idea
that quantitative research must be concerned with numbers. If we stipulate
that definition, we leave ourselves without a title for questions about quantity
which we may not wish to answer in numerical terms, but which are still not
qualitative. Thus we may want to ask, How much French do these students
know? and answer, Not much, or A fair amount or A great deal; or to
 QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: AN ANALYSIS 3

ask how healthy a person is and answer, Very fit indeed or Hes in pretty
poor shape, where it might seem misguided even to try to assign numerical
values to his health. Quantity is not necessary tied to numbers. Further, it
may seem optional whether we quantify that is, give numbers to some
result. We may say, She loves me du tout, un peu, beaucoup, passionment,
la folie: or we may put this on a 5-point scale, or even assign percentages to it.
It seems odd to say that one case is quantitative and the other not. Similarly
we may mark students essays as Poor, Fair, or Good, as A, B, or C,
or as falling within certain numerically-expressed percentiles. Is there any
important difference here?
Perhaps a more fundamental question is this: just what is supposed to be
quantitative or qualitative, what are these terms predicated on? We talk
vaguely of quantitative/qualitative research; a little less vaguely of quant-
itative/qualitative methods. Are there also qualitative/quantitative topics or
questions? How much . . . ? or How many. . . ? could be called quantitative
questions, What sort of . . . ? qualitative; and so with topics (The amount
of . . . or The kind of . . . ). That may be an important point: it may be that if
the researcher is really clear about the initial questions, then the research will
necessarily be quantitative or qualitative in the harmless sense that he is
trying to find out how much/many or what kind of.
Suppose we ask a question like, What kind of relationships exist in the
staff room of such-and-such a school? That is neither overtly quantitative
nor qualitative. Can we say now that we may use quantitative methods
for instance, we count how many blazing rows there are, or how many
people actually use the staff room, or whatever? Or qualitative methods
but then what exactly are these? Are they defined negatively, simply by the
fact that we do not use numbers or statistics? (Instead we use depth-interviews
or something, we try to get the feel of the atmosphere and relationships,
we talk to people or interact or observe without quantifying. Is any non-
numerical method qualitative, the method of the historian or the Scotland
Yard detective or the psychotherapist, for instance?) In any case the methods
we use will have to turn on what we are going to mean by relationships or
atmosphere; and, having decided (in sufficient detail) what we mean, we
then have to decide whether what we mean can be elicited by counting things
or by some other way. That again suggests that the really important thing is
for the researcher to be clear about the concepts in his initial question.
Or shall we say, scraping the bottom of the barrel, that the results of the
research may be quantitative or qualitative? But here again we may present
the results in various ways. A well-known poem of Elizabeth Browning be-
gins with the line, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: then she
enumerates some of the ways, whilst not exactly counting them or adding
4 JOHN B. WILSON AND SAMUEL M. NATALE

them up: is that quantitative or qualitative? In fact what she does is to

describe her love: she might or might not have assigned numerical values to
each way or item. And that is appropriate for the job which the poem tries
to do. The way in which the results of research are presented must turn on
what the research is supposed to find out or show: for some purposes a limpid
and insightful description in flowing prose may be better than statistics, for
others not.
We have the illusion that some things can be measured or quantified in
themselves, but others not. But we can, if we wish, measure or quantify
any attribute or quality or entity (even love, as on the 5-point scale mentioned
earlier). Measuring is something people do, not something inherent in par-
ticular things in the world. We may do it or not, depending on whether we
gain anything thereby or not. It is only if we ask an initial question, How
often/many. . . ? which compels us, logically, to enumerate that we actually
have to enumerate. But the illusion lies very deep. We feel that the nearer we
approach to physical objects and the world of natural science, the more we
have to measure and quantify; whereas when we talk of human feelings
(for instance) they are somehow too impalpable, we must be qualitative.
We may also have the illusion that only quantification is ultimately re-
spectable, because the evidence is more hard and undeniable. But that is
not so either: it is the common mistake of supposing one form of thought
(natural sciene and/or mathematics) to be more objective or truth-yielding
than another (for instance, history). But all forms of thought yield both cases
of certainty and cases of uncertainty. The important thing is to be clear about
the criteria of certainty in each case. (We know plenty of things for certain
in history, and about our neighbours.)
This last point is connected with a basic failure in heuristic (we do not say
methodological) procedure. What too often happens is this: we begin with a
question of some kind or, worse, just a topic without a formulated question.
We then immediately hunt around for some method or methods within an
existing or orthodox repertoire: we are to use questionnaires or interviews
or observation or something of that kind; and these methods are already
classified for us under the titles of quantitative or qualitative. (We may
even see ourselves as essentially quantitative or qualitative researchers,
and distort the question or the topic to suit our predilections.) But in fact any
method must flow, logically and conceptually, from the terminology of the
question. If I want to find out whether A really loves B, it will be useless to
count up the number of times each calls the other Darling, because that may
be said with love or between clenched teeth. Would it be relevant to count up
the number of times they made love, or listened to music together? Perhaps
it would; but only if we can see some conceptual connection between real
 QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: AN ANALYSIS 5

love on the one hand and these activities on the other. Here, very obviously,
the quantitative/qualitative distinction is useless at the very least, we cannot
make an advance decision to use one or the other.
We submit that any useful distinction between quantitative and qualitat-
ive is already inherent in ordinary language (between How much/many. . . ?
and What kind of . . . ? and bearing in mind that How much? is different
from How many?). (It is strange that quantitative comes from the Latin
quantus (= how much) rather than quot (= how many) or quotiens (= how
many times), even though it is commonly associated with numbers.) As used
or abused in educational research it is a muddle and marks nothing useful,
and indeed can be very misleading. Researchers look too quickly for given
methods which will do their work for them. As a researcher I need only
be concerned with what X (in my research-question or topic) means, how to
verify the existence of X in principle (that is pretty well the same question),
and how to verify X on the ground or in practice. The quantitative/qualitative
distinction if indeed there is any clear distinction is of no help in this.
Somebody may object: This is a fuss about nothing. Sometimes in re-
search we need to count or use numbers, to ask, How many. . . ? or How
often . . . ?, and thats quantitative; sometimes we dont, we ask, What sort
of . . . ?, and thats qualitative. That is harmlessly true; and if someone wants
to raise the question, Shall we use numbers or not? in the form, Shall we re-
search quantitatively or qualitatively?, I have no objection. So too if someone
wants to talk about quantitative and qualitative methods. But it has to be
observed that both methods may be relevant to the same research-question,
as I have already hinted.
Suppose we ask in a general way, Whats the discipline like in this
school? Then we may, or may not, decide to use numbers: we find out how
many children are kept in detention, how many are excluded from school,
perhaps how many cases of gross disobedience there are all that is quantit-
ative. And we might present our overall conclusions qualitatively: we say,
Discipline is pretty good/bad. Or we might just observe what goes on, or ask
teachers whether they expect to be obeyed, and produce the same conclusions,
without using numbers. Conversely, if we ask an apparently quantitative
question, like, How many classes in this school are well-disciplined?, or
How many children in this area are literate?, or What percentage of chil-
dren are bullied?, it is clear that we must at some point (preferably quite early
on) know what is to count as well-disciplined, or literate, or bullying,
what kind of things or phenomena these actually are; and that is, I suppose, a
matter of determining their nature or quality.
Sometimes of course the phenomena are not (so to speak) conceptually
controversial in the way that discipline, or literacy, or bullying are. We may
6 JOHN B. WILSON AND SAMUEL M. NATALE

enumerate how many children actually attend school, or are excluded from
school, or pass a particular examination, or are officially in care, and that
may be very useful. But the snag is that this does not tell us very much about
their learning, or indeed the rest of their lives. A child may learn more outside
school, pass an examination in French without knowing much French (or vice
versa), and a child can be in care without necessarily being properly cared
for. Even if we collect a good deal of quantitative data, we have (to use a
popular phrase) to interrogate the data in order to see what it means. In most
kinds of research, quantitative data cannot often usefully stand alone.
Certainly there are faults on both sides (if indeed we must take sides,
as we ought not to). Most obviously, numbers are improperly used: we are
told for instance that x% or students suffer from mental ill-health, y% of
marriages are unhappy, z% or children are below an acceptable standard
of numeracy, and so on. Here it is not clear what the percentages are about,
because the quality of the phenomena is not clear. Qualitative research-
ers on the other hand often eschew any serious attempt at objectivity (and
some openly disclaim it): they are too often content to report other peoples
perceptions of the phenomena, and rarely face the (admittedly sometimes
difficult) question of the form, What do we, or can we most usefully, mean
by mentally ill, literate, bullying?
That brings us back again to the supreme importance of clarifying the
initial concept; and here there are two important points to be made:
1. It is not, or not always, the case that we have to proceed in chronolo-
gical stages, first defining our terms (clarifying the concepts) and then,
dropping this kind of enquiry with a sigh of relief, proceeding to the
straightforward empirical research. For (a) we have to keep the concepts
particularly the methods of verification clear during the empirical
research: we cannot for instance identify or observe cases of bullying
unless we keep the concept and its verification in mind throughout; and
(b) we need not always or only clarify the concepts whilst sitting in
an armchair: often it helps to look at phenomena on the ground, and
only then make up our minds what we are going to mean by bullying.
(Philosophers do something like this when they ask us to imagine vari-
ous cases, and then ask, Would we call that bullying? But real-life
experience is often helpful.)
2. Rather less obviously, but importantly, the conceptual clarification
points us towards certain empirical necessities. I mean this: suppose that
we take the term well-disciplined to mean something like obeying
the legitimate authority because it is the legitimate authority (not just
being trouble-free or pacified). Then we know that, whatever else may
be empirically relevant, certain features must be (because they go with
 QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: AN ANALYSIS 7

the concept as we now understand it): there must be an authority, the au-
thority must be legitimate (what legitimises it, and how far does its scope
extend?), there must be acts of obedience, and certain reasons for obedi-
ence must be in place (because the authority legitimately commands, not
just because the holder of authority is charismatic or charming or terrify-
ing). There are many other examples: working out whether children are
properly cared for, for instance, is as much a matter of working out the
concept(s) marked by care as a matter of seeing what happens on the
ground. And that is partly because one cannot really see what happens
on the ground except through or with the aid of certain concepts.
So we have something like an interaction between conceptual enquiry and
empirical fact-finding: they are logically different forms of enquiry and must
not be muddled up, we cannot do both at precisely the same time: but we have
to be able to handle both throughout our research, and move adeptly from
one to the other. And for this, we are claiming, the quantitative/qualitative
distinction except in a defused and harmless form is a hindrance, or at
least certainly no help. Perhaps researchers are not to blame (very often their
hands are tied by funding agencies or other potentates who dictate the form
of their research to them), but at least they should regard the distinction with
a critical eye.

***

The whole question of methods or heuristic procedures can however be

pursued more constructively and sensibly (and at much greater length than
we can do here).
The demise of positivism and behaviourism has at least reminded us of
the (fairly obvious: we do not need new philosophies to teach it to us) fact
that a lot of research is about what goes on in the minds of human beings (not
their brains: that is physiology or some other kind of natural science). That
certainly requires the use of methods or heuristic procedures of some kind;
only, they will not be those of natural science, because the subject-matter is in
a different logical category. They will at least be more like, perhaps very like,
those in use by people who do in fact explore the human mind: historians,
psychiatrists, anthropologists, or even we ourselves when we try to find out
more about what our neighbours or colleagues or life-partners are really like.
What actually happens in these cases? A rough distinction can be made
between two sorts of things that happens, and that advance this sort of re-
search. (We put the word in inverted commas, because it may for some
already carry with it certain connotations of particular methods or meth-
8 JOHN B. WILSON AND SAMUEL M. NATALE

odologies, perhaps incorporated in terms like experiment, hypothesis:

connotations which may be inappropriate for the subject-matter only in a
very broad sense do we conduct experiments about my life-partner, or even
form hypotheses about him/her.) The two things are:

1. Researchers, essentially by using their imagination and in-depth know-

ledge of the subject-matter, may call our attention to new swathes of
evidence. Thus Marx claimed that to make sense of political and social
history we should take account of economic structures; Freud claimed
that to make sense of overt behaviour we should take account of early
childhood and the unconscious mind: and so on. Here we would perhaps
speak not so much of methods, but (at most) of heuristic procedures,
ways of directing our attention. They would of course generate new
methods (as in 2 below) but they are not themselves methods. It may
well be that educational research stands much in need of this.
2. Then there are things which could be called methods or even some-
times techniques. We may say, Well, if you really want to find out what
makes a person tick, put him/her on the couch in the consulting-room
and let him talk freely, or more simply, People are more themselves and
more visible as such if they are slightly drunk (in vino veritas). Or the
historian might claim that by looking at something in great detail (a list
of property-owners, perhaps) we shall gain much insight into the social
or political structure of some society at a particular time; or the anthro-
pologist eating-habits of a tribe are of central importance, so that only by
eating with the tribe can we really understand how the tribe functions:
or that only by watching married couples in bed can one really grasp the
essence of their relationship (here researchers might bump up against
ethical objections. . . ). These are methods or techniques for getting at a
kind of evidence which we already know or claim to be important, in
this way not unlike the techniques used in nuclear physics. And a lot of
research may stand in need of these too.

It is important to note that there is no given procedure for discovering or

inventing either 1. or 2. We have simply to look very hard at human beings
and their learning, and use our imagination. Precisely because there are no
given methods, nothing analogous to the well-established principles of sci-
entific method, we have to start by opening out minds fully to the very wide
question, What is it to find out about other people, about how they think and
feel and why they act as they do, about their intentions and motives and goals
and so on? And then one would naturally begin by seeing how we do this
(often very successfully) in everyday life: for we all operate, more or less
efficiently, as historians or psychiatrists or anthropologists if we did not, we
 QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: AN ANALYSIS 9

could hardly relate to our fellow-humans at all. Then, on this basis, we may
ask the general question, How can we jack up or sophisticate the procedures
we now use? How can be make them sharper or more definitive without losing
what may be essential to the subject matter? How for instance can we find
out whether A really loves B, or whether C really has greater self-esteem,
or whether D has become more enthusiastic about French or science how
can we do justice to these concepts without reducing them to quite different
concepts (perhaps by stipulating an operational definition), but also without
saying at the end only something hopelessly woolly?
In searching for answers to these questions it is fatal to circumscribe our
enquiries too quickly. Thus, it is widely recognised that some novelists
Proust, for instance, perhaps Dostoievky, not a few others do in fact tell us a
great deal about what people are like: even about how they think and feel and
act as learners, which is the particular province of educational research. Well,
just how do they do this? What techniques of observation or reflection do
they use? Can the rest of us learn to use them? We take this example because
(to the best of our knowledge) it is one which educational researchers have
not taken up. Yet once we ask the general question first it is a very obvious
example of successful enquiry into what human beings are actually like.
A final point: We are of course aware that some of these issues have been
taken up in what is called the philosophy of social science. But the way in
which they have been taken up is in various respects unsatisfactory. First, we
are not always concerned with social science: there may be as much to be
learned from enquiry into the depths of individual minds as from society.
(Moreover, we are not really concerned with science, if that term is used on
the model of natural science, for reasons already given.) Secondly, the issues
are dealt with too ideologically: new philosophies (post-destructivism or
whatever) are rapidly run up, as if we needed some overall theory or Weltan-
schauung, some sort of answer in substantive terms, some model of human
nature (again on the analogy of natural-science models). And thirdly, even if
ideology or wholesale theory is avoided, there is nearly always insufficient
attention to the particular case. How, on the ground, do we find out whether
we have been deceiving ourselves? How does reading Tolstoys Anna Karen-
ina help us to know what self-deception is like? What is actually learned by
the client in this or that piece of psychotherapy, and how do we verify that
it has been leaned? How does such-and-such a teacher come to know what
will catch the enthusiasm of such-and-such a pupil? These are the kind of
questions we should be asking. The objection to the terminology of quant-
itative and qualitative research is just one aspect of a general objection,
which serious researchers should register more strongly than they now do, to
10 JOHN B. WILSON AND SAMUEL M. NATALE

the whole idea of being presented with a repertoire of methods on a plate:

when in fact researchers have to work these out for themselves.

References
Creswell, J. W. (1994). Research Design: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. London:
SAGE.
Wiesman, W. (1986). Research Methods in Eduction (4th edn). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Cohen, L and I. Manion (1994). Research Methods in Education (4th edn). London: RKP.