Introduction
Quantification and experimentation have dominated the research practices of psychologists for nearly as long as the discipline has been in existence. Qualitative and nonexperimental methods, if used by experimental psychologists, have typically been seen to be in the service of the more “scientifically” rigorous methods. The dominance of quantitative research in psychology can be traced to the beginnings of the social sciences in general in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Undergirding this dominance was the notion that the world was objectively given and knowable and that individual minds being a part of nature could be explored scientifically (Gergen, 2001). Given the success of quantitative methods in the natural sciences, it made sense to the founders of the social sciences to adopt those methods for their purposes (Fox, Porter, & Wokler, 1995). Thus, experimentation, observation, quantification, and prediction became the standards of research. It was...
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Online Resources
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research. http://www.qualitative-research.net/
Qualitative Research: Sage Journals. http://www.qrj.sage.pub.com/
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Qualitative Research. http://www.qsrinternational.com/what-is-qualitative-research-aspx
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Faux, R. (2014). Quantitative Research. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_558
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