Research in psychology, and related disciplines like education and sociology, can broadly be divided into quantitative (that which generates data in the form of numbers) and qualitative (that which generates data in the form of words). Some researchers are fiercely attached to either qualitative or quantitative methods and arguments can get quite heated.
Psychology benefits from having both qualitative and quantitative methods. Take the example of Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience. Milgram famously found that 100% of participants obeyed orders to give painful and dangerous electric shocks to a man they believed to be a fellow participant, 65% giving the full charge of up to 300 volts. These headline figures are quantitative. Without these figures we would be left asking ‘Yes, but how obedient were participants?’ The value of the figures is obvious.
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