Quantitative vs qualitative research: A false dichotomy

Over recent years I have found myself in debates about students’ work that centred on notions of rigor. This is not in itself remarkable and indeed discussions of rigor are very appropriate. However, what has been surprising is that these discussions have often been with academic colleagues who were judging the quality of the student’s work by criteria that were inappropriate given the research question and the approach the student had taken. Most recently there have been a couple of occasions when a student’s qualitative descriptive research was judged by criteria most normally applied to statistical research. On both these occasions the students’ work was being criticised for being non-generalisable and non- representative and I found myself in the familiar territory of the Qualitative vs Quantitative Debate or QQD as Krantz (1995) calls it.