1. Quantitative Research Methods Overview

2. The Most Important Thing Is To Ask Tough Questions at the Outset What kinds of questions do I want to ask? What kinds of questions can I ask? What kinds of information is feasibly obtained from the population in question? Can I get there from here? Have I got the right “stuff”?

3. Good News and Bad News? In the extreme example, Quantitative Research may tend to buy you the luxury of distance, safety, an air-conditioned office, fresh water, and a toilet In the extreme example, Qualitative Research may tend to require a much more “hands-on”, “go-bush,” “get-in-the- native’s-face,” and subsequent danger.

4. The Project Dictates the Style Some questions can’t be answered without a very close look at the human side of the phenomena. Go bush, as it were. Other questions require hard numbers which may be primary data (collected by you) or secondary data (collected by someone else). The two approaches are complementary.

5. First, a Lesson in Philosophy The Golden Aristotilean “mean”— everything sort of reaches a happy understandable medium sooner or later Maimonides “Systematic Doubt” Rene DesCartes’ “Deductive Reasoning” Francis Bacon “Inductive Reasoning” Newtownian “Hypothetical Reasoning” Kantian notion of uncertainty

6. Kant’s Transcendental Logic “If the receptivity of our mind, its power of receiving representations..., is to be entitled sensibility, then the mind’s power of producing representations of itself, the spontaneity of knowledge, should be called the understanding.... Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts blind. It is... necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to

7. .... To make our intuitions intelligible,... to bring them under concepts. “The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through [their] union can knowledge arise.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1777)

8. Qualitative What is a quality that something possesses? Primary, secondary? Where does it come from? The source? How might one describe it? Does one “see” the same as another? “The thing itself,” according to Kant, has shifted from the thing as it “is” in world to one’s perception thereof. Problem?

9. Qualitative How do we know it? Epistemology  What is that we know? Phenomenology  At what point do we have to assume we have the best possible vantage point? At some point we have to bite the bullet, as it were.

10. Maimonides the Mystery Man Reality was like an onion Sensible, knowable, understandable Peel away, and all will be known unto you EXCEPT—There’s always going to be something left, unknowable. He fretted over what one couldn’t know, but, assuming it the Divine, he didn’t feel too badly about it.

11. DesCartes the Deducer Thinks he’s got it all in his pocket, but proceeds through a systematic doubt He starts with Cogito, ergo sum” and tries to establish Systematically fusses over what is and what isn’t. Gets a bad case of reality with Queen Cristina of Sweden, dies after to too many naked snow frolics.

12. Descartes Minus the Smut? Deductive reasoning process Start with theoretical model or assumption and then proceed logically from there. Problems with DesCartes? Believed that logic would guide his path, empirical knowledge secondary to logic Analogous to “armchair anthropologist” of centuries later A Favorite of British Social Anthropologists

13. The Fabulous Bacon Boys Bugger everything that’s every been known—start over. Inductive Reasoning Process: Collect data until there is no question of truth The catch, however, is to “do the experiment” via empirical observations. Cleanse the “idols” that might bias understanding

14. Newtonian Hypothetical Science Make a hunch Test the hunch See if the hunch pans out according to expectations, i.e., does what you expected to find match what you found? Start over if needed. When all else fails, make the math so dense and impenetrable that critics die before they’ve second-guessed you.

15. So, Where Do We Go From Here? Observation breeds concepts, concepts breed a grouped or thematic dimension to the real world? Where do words fail and numbers succeed? How does one strike the balance? Might the quantitative dimension potentially be as flawed as the qualitative?