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The Quantitative Imperative

Positivism, Naive Realism and the Place of Qualitative Methods in Psychology

University of Sydney, joelm{at}psych.usyd.edu.au

The quantitative imperative is the view that in science, when you cannot measure, you do not really know what you are talking about, but when you can, you do, and, therefore, qualitative methods have no place in psychology. On the basis of this imperative, qualitative research methods are still excluded from mainstream psychology. Where does this view come from? Many qualitative researchers think it is an expression of positivism. Is this attribution correct? Then again, qualitative researchers often confuse positivism with naive realism. What is the relationship between the quantitative imperative and naive realism? In this paper it is shown that in finding opposition, qualitative researchers did not, as they sometimes allege, come up against the hard, positivistic edge of science. They encountered something at once much more deep-seated than positivism but also something much less hardheaded than they suppose positivism to have been. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, positivism is no barrier to qualitative methods. As for naive realism, it provides a firm foundation for qualitative methods in psychology. It is argued that in psychology, the quantitative imperative is an egregious, potentially self-perpetuating form of methodological error.

Key Words: positivism • qualitative methods • quantitative imperative • realism

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 1, 5-31 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354303013001758


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