The Virtue of Qualitative and Quantitative Research

The human enterprise of research may be characterized as a problem-solving activity, one driven by curiosity or by various needs for information—to take action in the face of threats, to make predictions, to test a theory about how nature works, or to establish a context of meaning and order. In the Judeo-Christian cosmology, it may be speculated that research might never have arisen had Adam and Eve not been expelled from the Garden of Eden. Perfect circumstances create little or no need for an expanded understanding of the origin of problems. But once out of the Garden, as soon as he stubbed his toe or stepped on a thorn, Adam might have been heard to say, “Ouch! What was that? How did it happen? How can I avoid getting hurt again?” If necessity is the mother of invention, problems may be the mother of research.

The philosophical foundations of the modern scientific research method can be traced back three centuries. As science historian Stephen Toulmin has noted [1], it was then that the Renaissance of Montaigne and Shakespeare, noteworthy for its celebration of humanity in all of its diversity, gave way to the demoralizing and enervating Thirty Years' War, a conflict fueled by religious and ethnic intolerance. In prostrate and exhausted postwar Europe, Descartes and Newton arose, promulgating rational thought as a mechanism for progress and a way to overcome humankind's foibles. …