Quantitative or Qualitative?

Policy is driven by facts!

A few years ago I attended a methodology session at an academic conference. A civil servant from the Department of Business or Education, I can't remember which, or even what it was called at that time, stood up at the and said they were only interested in quantitative research.  Policy had to be driven by verified facts and qualitative research did not provide that.  I was slightly surprised that he was suggesting that policy is actually driven by any observable facts, but made a note that if I did some research and aspired to have influence it would have to be quantitative.

Looming disillusionment with the quantitative approach

At the time I was starting my part-time Ph.D. looking at entrepreneurial graduates and did aspire to make an impact on either policy or practice, and as a scientist by training the quantitative approach was more natural to me.  However I already read many learned papers from the Journal of Business Venturing, and other highly regarded journals, and had become disillusioned by the approach that most of them take.  Some otherwise excellent papers on nascent entrepreneurs using data from a large US database (PSED) look impressive but their conclusions were undermined by the very broad range of nascent entrepreneurs in the samples. One critical author remarked that they might as well be researching holiday-makers, both are highly diverse and transient groups.

Out with factual quantitative; in with insightful qualitative

However, I did consider using a quantitative approach myself and found a very similar problem.  Looking at about 100 creative entrepreneurs who had gone through the DigitalCity Fellowship they varied enormously in their backgrounds, their ideas, their motivations, and their attitudes to business start-up.  Even if I worked with all of them it was clear that the sample would totally inadequate to tease out the many and various issues that I could already observe.

So, with the encouragement of my tutors, I opted for a qualitative approach in which I would look in great depth at a small number of participants, using very tight selection criteria. 

The lucky sample of seven

A previous blog has described how the selection criteria help me identify young, business naive, creative graduates starting a business immediately on graduation.  In the end I found eight suitable participants. Happily only one of these turned me down.  Eight would have been a nice round number, but seven is said to be a lucky number… and I perhaps I will need luck more than I need roundness.

Will I be ever be influential (before I'm 99)?

Will I ever influence policy or practice?  It is clear that I won’t influence policymakers directly, but hopefully I can prepare both academic and practitioner papers from my research which may have an effect on those who support creative NAGRENTs in their difficult task. My tutors tell me that the purpose of my research is to gain insights that may in themselves have some influence, or may lead on to further research to verify more explicitly some of the findings.  It sounds as if I might have many years of postdoctoral research ahead of me!

Next blogs………….

The next blog will describe briefly the seven participants and show how even with the tight selection criteria I have seven very interesting and varied cases to study.  After that I am going to start blogging about some of the academic papers that have influenced my thinking and my approach.