Book review: Goertz and Mahoney on methods
“I wanted to love this book,” Michael Woolcock of Harvard University says, “and ended up merely liking it.” The book in question is A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences, by Gary Goertz and James Mahoney. The authors “strive to articulate a metaframework that identifies how qualitative and quantitative approaches can peacefully coexist,” Woolcock says. But the project is compromised by the book’s inattention to forms of qualitative research used by many scholars. Still, Woolcock lauds A Tale of Two Cultures as “an important landmark contribution to social science research.” Read the review.
