Mind the Gap?: Navigating the Quantitative and the Qualitative in Survey Research

Abstract

One of the persistent concerns and conflicts faced by social scientists who study different aspects of Indian society and politics pertains to a methodological divide. This divide is constituted by a separation of methods into the quantitative and qualitative broadly. While these two categories cover a wide range of methods and techniques of research and data collection, they have also been treated as representing two polarities of the social sciences, often seemingly opposed. This note will explore the division between the quantitative and qualitative. 3 While we feel that any divide in method and theory is counterproductive to the larger project of studying political life, we want to try and see how this separation can be bridged without necessarily forcing cohabitation. By looking at the survey as a method, this note is an initial attempt to engage in a dialogue between quantitative-and qualitative-oriented scholars and to perhaps consider how the two groups are far closer than they think.

Understanding aspirations among Muslim youth in India through Sequential mixed-methods design

“…38 I also wanted to obtain the attitudes and opinions of Muslim youth regarding several important issues such as self-employment, the characteristics of what comprises a good job for them, whether or not they receive support for their aspirations and employment choices from their family, the role of social class in finding a desirable job, discrimination in jobs around their religious identity (GOI, 2006;Das, 2010;Mhaskar, 2018;Salman, 2022; for a context for discrimination) and so on. Survey methods using random sampling techniques was deemed fit for this exercise (see Datta and Vaid, 2018).…”

“…The PhD followed the explanatory sequential design within mixed-methods (Creswell, 2015; see Figure 2), whereby a qualitative study follows the quantitative one, and explains the results of the latter (ibid.). I employed the survey method (Babbie, 2007;Creswell, 2015;Datta and Vaid, 2018) in the first round and life-histories (Goodson 2001) in the second round. Survey interview schedule and semi-structured interview schedule were used, respectively, to obtain data.…”

Lockdown Anthropology and Online Surveys: Unprecedented Methods for Unprecedented Times

“…My own work, for instance, has critiqued Barometer surveys for capturing conventionalized expressions of dissatisfaction with democracy, rather than illuminating the intersubjective origins of democratic malaise (Long, 2016). Consequently, as Datta and Vaid (2018, p. 142) note, when anthropologists do use surveys, these generally stay subordinate to ethnography in the analytical process. They might be used to ‘quantitatively verify’ hypotheses developed through ethnography (Snodgrass et al, 2016, p. 60), or to provide an initial overview of the range of experiences within a population, contextualizing the ‘rich narratives’ elicited in follow-up ethnographic interviews (O’Connor, 2019, p. 249).…”