Wise words from Colin Mills:
“I’m seldom interested in the data in front of me for its own sake and normally want to regard it as evidence about some larger population (or process) from which it has been sampled. In saying this I am not saying that quantification is all there is to sociology. That would be absurd. Before you can count anything you have to know what you are looking for, which implies that you have to have spent some time thinking out the concepts that will organize reality and tell you what is important.”
“… the institutionalized and therefore little questioned distinction between qualitative and quantitative empirical research is, to say the least, unhelpful and should be abolished. There is a much bigger intellectual gulf between those who just want to study what is in front of their eyes and those who view what is in front of their eyes as an instantiation of something bigger. Qualitative or quantitative if your business is generalization you have to have some theory of inference and if you don’t then your intellectual project is, in my view, incoherent.”