Quality, Quantity and the Third Way
Nigel Gilbert · 2005
Social scientists have been struggling for the past fifty years with positioning themselves on a series of apparently crucial contrasts: Positivism vs Realism; Quantitative vs Qualitative data; Etic vs Emic analyses; Critical vs participatory research design and so on. While it is quite fun, and occasionally revealing, to debate the merits of these polarities, in the real world of social research, there are more important issues and more options than is sometimes noticed. In this talk, I shall review these dichotomies and point out that for most of them, there is a 'third way': methodological choices that the traditional distinctions recognise barely, if at all. The remainder of the talk will describe in more detail one such: a 'third way ' that is neither straightforwardly quantitative nor qualitative. This is the use of computational models to represent social theories and empirical data. Such models are beginning to be used to explore both rather abstract 'artificial societies ' and to develop strategic games that can be played by policymakers to explore policy options through interacting with other stakeholders and researchers in virtual worlds. The opportunities for this third way will be illustrated briefly with reference to work on Senegal River irrigation and the management of domestic water in Zurich.