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14 mars 2016

Revealing the quantitative-qualitative divide in sociology using bibliometric visualization

Since the dawn of sociology it has been a divisive issue: quantitative versus qualitative. The very word sociology (from French sociologie) was suggested by one of the founding scholars, Auguste Comte, as an alternative to social physics (again from French physique sociale) a term appropriated by Adolphe Quetelet, who used it to describe his statistical research. Until the 1920s, objects were deemed to be of either a quantitative or a qualitative nature. This dichotomy changed after the 1920s due to a steady rise of statistical methods in sociology. In contemporary sociology, both approaches are increasingly used to study the same general topics. However, as we will show below, the divide never fully subsided. Moreover, we find that research topics are intimately tied to their methods. The universe of quantitative sociology consists of terms like "survey", "data" and "scale" but also of "socioeconomic status", "women", "men" and "career". The universe of qualitative sociology consists of terms such as "discourse", "practice" and "meaning" but also of "power", "identity" and "masculinity". More...

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