Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Category: qualitative and quantitative research debate

  • Critique to sociology and related disciplines by Bastos

    But the idea is that there is a kind of determinism, that there is a series of statistical data from the past that can be used to predict the future, and from those statistics, from that data, a deterministic vision is born. So, for example, everything that is forecasting, futures analysis, and things like that…

  • The Black Swan: Understanding the Power of the Unexpected

    We like to believe the world is predictable. We build plans, forecasts, strategies, and expectations based on what we already know. We look at the past and assume it can help us understand the future. Most of the time, this works well enough. But every so often, something happens that breaks our assumptions completely. This…

  • Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis

    Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-three Israeli mothers, this article seeks to contribute to an ongoing inquiry into women’s subjective experiences of mothering by addressing an understudied maternal emotive and cognitive stance: regretting motherhood. The literature teaches us that within a pronatal monopoly, threatening women that they will inevitably regret not having children acts as…

  • Why “there is no such thing as economic science”?

    I have recently referred to an interview made to Piketty where he states “there is no such thing as economic science. There are social sciences”. He argues that “economic processes involve social control” and that “we should teach ‪economics‬ much more in conjunction with economic‪ ‎history‬, social history, political history, political science” That said, the…

  • Spurious correlations

    “Spurious correlations” is the name of a website I came across recently. There you can see plenty of cases where correlation may not imply causation. What does it mean in terms of research methods in the social sciences? It means that whenever our research approach is uniquely quantitative, we take the risk of come up with wrong…

  • “Quantitative and qualitative social science” by Daniel Little

    I would like to share here a outstanding post on the quantitative/qualitative debate by Daniel Little in his blog Understanding Society. Debate addressed in previous posts here and that is gaining more and more importance within social science. THE social world is one reality, but the methodologies associated with quantitative and qualitative research are quite different.…

  • Why the qualitative approach is essential for every research project?

    “Recently, it was conducted a global survey which sought to answer the following question: Please answer honestly. How in your opinion could be solved the problem of lack of food in many countries in the world?” The survey was a failure because in Africa nobody knew what food means. In France nobody knew what honesty…

  • Imagine a conversation between the qualitative and quantitative approach!

    (Needless to say that if case Qualitative would be feminine and quantitative masculine) – Mr. Quantitative: we need to find out social causal relationships -Mrs. Qualitative: why? -Mr. Quantitative: obviously, to be able to do law-like generalizations like natural scientist do! -Mrs. Qualitative: It is not possible because relationships of human beings might be spurious. –…

  • The limits of quantitative research in social sciences

    “If there is no net force on an object, then its velocity is constant. The object is either at rest (if its velocity is equal to zero), or it moves with constant speed in a single direction“. First Newton law The mastering of the so called “law-like generalizations” (Saunders et at, 2009) produced within natural science…