Quantitative Unease
A column dedicated to demystifying psychotherapy research – love it, hate it, or both…at least try to know what it’s all about!
Is Quantitative Research Male and Masculine?
Positivist social sciences have been criticized for their androcentric epistemological underpinnings and methodological practices. Historically, knowledge has been linked to the male in philosophy. For example, Francis Bacon viewed men as knowers and women as knowable. Men produce objective knowledge when using quantitative methods and discover ‘the truth’ about what they are studying. Hence, quantitative research with its focus on experimentation, statistics and analytical techniques to test hypotheses, is associated with science. The nomothetic, masculine approach to science stresses prediction and explanation. These foci are in stark contrast with qualitative research, where data are gathered through interviews and the emphasis is on personal meaning, development of theories and gaining an in-depth understanding of people’s experiences. Interpretivism, subjectivity, ‘non-scientific’ and femininity are common associations with qualitative approaches.
Gender has been distinguished from biological sex (male/female). It includes ascribed attributes, such as autonomy, strength, dependency and vulnerability, which were linked to the hierarchical gendered categories ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Gendering is connected with distribution of power and knowledge. Over the past decades, feminists have challenged that the scientific logic of discovery has to be male. However, binary thinking and traditional dichotomies, such as male-female, quantitative-qualitative, objectivity-subjectivity, masculine-feminine, and numbers-words, have resulted in several widely accepted assumptions about research.
For example, that numbers are essential to quantitative research. Quantification is associated with male, truth, generalizability, reliability and ideologically linked to a masculine style of control. Own values have no place in objective research and, therefore, should not influence what/how researchers observe and measure. Verifiable knowledge is produced through application of mathematical and statistical computer packages. Knower (researcher) and the object to be known (data) are independent from each other. When ‘separate knowing’ is a prerequisite, words become unimportant. The researcher remains an outsider. S/he neither engages with her/his subjects nor data at a deeper level, because neutrality is valued.
This contrasts with ‘connected knowing’, where an intimate relationship between qualitative researchers and participants/data, exists. Getting close to the personal world of the participant is a must. Transcribing interviews and deriving meaning from words require a different involvement with the data than analyzing numerical outputs. Words are considered within contexts, in relation to other words, to develop ideas and intuitions about the findings as the data are being collated. Exploring the meaning that participants assign to their experiences is fundamental to the acquisition of knowledge. Such ‘connected knowing’ is associated with feminist knowledge and feminist epistemology, which is distinct from the traditional, positivist Anglo-American epistemology.
Qualitative research has been linked to ‘feminist science’, although this is a contradiction in terms, because science is masculine. Its inquiry is idiographic, individuals are viewed as complex entities, and descriptions about experiences are detailed. Reflexivity, methodological self-consciousness, where researchers become aware of own biases, their research role and how their discursive choices affect participants, are integral to the research process. Subjectivity is central and researchers dispute claims that quantitative research is objective.
Their stance is not unfounded. Choice of topic, literature reviews, type of questions and interpretation of results are to a certain degree subjective. Why does a researcher study depression rather than obsessions? Limiting the inclusion criteria to papers published in English introduces bias. Survey questions erroneously assume that equality exists in society and that all respondents have equal literacy skills. Even statistics are not objective. Findings appear inflated when p-values are set at 0.5 instead of 0.001. So knowledge gained from quantitative methods is partially subjective.
Furthermore, some feminist researchers believe that quantitative research conflicts with their research aims. They have drawn attention to ‘who’ produces knowledge and ‘how it is used’. What was labelled as ‘universal knowledge’ was purely male knowledge, feminists have argued. Women were simply ‘added’ when findings from men were generalized to women. Hence, instead of concentrating on knowledge, researchers should be examining the ‘lack of knowledge’: why certain knowledge is either obliterated or not incorporated into tenets and norms.
All of these practices are problematic, gendered epistemological issues. They point to the social construction of knowledge and reality. When knowledge is the product of particular political, social, historical and cultural discourses, ontology (what is reality) and epistemology (what counts as knowledge) acquire new meaning.
The notion of multiple realities and truths is in line with postmodernism, which views researchers as co-participants in the generation of data. Accepting that only discourses are created in the research process, quantitative assumptions lose their authority. Thus, if we apply postmodernist thinking to my question, is quantitative research male and masculine, then the answer will be ‘yes …but this is just one discourse of many’. Nevertheless, the question then arises as to why this particular discourse is privileged. Why are methodologies gendered? Because androcentrism, the practice of giving overriding importance to men and their masculine viewpoints, lies at the heart of science. It is not merely a byproduct of a male majority.
Exploration of gender relations is inherent in the qualitative approach. Feminist researchers have developed ‘gender sensitive’ methods. It was a reaction against data gathering techniques, which had failed to take into account women’s experiences. In this way patriarchal prejudices in social research were challenged.
No corresponding movement is found in masculinity studies. Why is that so? One likely explanation points to the pre-existing preponderance of men. Positivist practices have disproportionately created knowledge from a masculine perspective. So it was assumed that there was no need to develop femininity studies.
I wonder what would happen if quantitative research became female and feminine? Currently, the nomothetic approach is the dominant paradigm in the social sciences. Would the social sciences maintain their high status, if they were no longer be linked to male and masculine?
If we abandoned dualities and no longer divided research into quantitative/qualitative, and viewed it as ‘both male and female’, would that enable researchers to overcome epistemological and methodological rivalries? Possibly.
But how realistic is ‘gender neutral’ research? Perhaps this calls for a paradigm shift, which normally occurs when established practices are no longer fit for purpose and new approaches are needed.
Wishful thinking or food for thought?