Caleb McDaniel replies to my musings about qualitative and quantitative methods with the comment:
Historians had something like the navel-gazing debate you call for during the 1970s and 1980s controversies about "cliometric" history. But since the new cultural history defenders of qualitative history seemed to win out (at least institutionally) in those debates, the question doesn't seem to come up as much anymore. Frankly, if historians were still required by professional canons to crunch numbers, I would be in deep trouble.
Navel-gazing is right. When most of the profession devotes itself to how to do what it does, rather than just doing it, the amount of new knowledge got out is limited.
Economic, demographic and other forms of "quantitative history" have been making a quiet comeback since the early 1990s (not least because of the IPUMS). More humble about what they can achieve, they have become more integrated with the rest of the historical community.
The question that interests me--and a few others, I hope, because I won't get to it for some years--is the more limited one of why some-to-many people in some disciplines sometimes overstate the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods. It interests me because I don't see the difference is worth making much of.
What matters is: is the question a good one? That doesn't suppose any method or type of data to be best.
Posted by robe0419 at February 28, 2005 8:20 PM