International Journal of Market Research Vol.
57 Issue 6
Book reviews
A tale of two cultures:
Qualitative and quantitative
research in the social sciences
Gary Goertz and James Mahoney
Princeton University Press, 2012
238pp, paperback £22.95
ISBN 978 0 691 14971 4
DOI: 10.2501/IJMR-2015-073
This book is an illuminating read for
anybody interested in bridging the gap
between academic and commercial
research, and similarly anybody inter-
ested in understanding some of the
key differences that underpin qualita-
tive and quantitative research. Goertz
and Mahoney focus on the nature of
qualitative and quantitative research in
order to understand the overlaps and
differences. The key focus of the book
relates to the different ways in which
causal relationships are investigated by
qualitative and quantitative researchers.
It is important to see this book in its
correct context, i.e. as an exploration
and explication of an important topic.
The book is not a guide for action or a
manual for producing better research,
its focus is on creating a better under-
standing of things that are more often
done than understood.
The book establishes that qualita-
tive and quantitative are different, that
they reflect different cultures, and that
they differ in the compromises they
are prepared to make in order to
establish causal links between phe-
nomena. Indeed, for me, the key point
that arises from the book is that every
© 2015 The Market Research Society 959
research approach represents a trade-
off. All of the available approaches
have significant drawbacks, and the
cultural differences between qualitative
and quantitative research are illus-
trated by which elements are preserved
and which sacrificed, when making
these trade-offs.
Effects-of-causes, or causes-of-
effects
One of the key differences highlighted
by the authors relates to the difference
between:
• effects-of-causes – for example, if
young people stay an extra two
years at school, what will be the
impact on long-term GDP
• causes-of-effects – for example,
what factors are causing the growth
of discount retailing?
Quantitative, academic research has
largely rejected causes-of-effects as a
suitable topic for investigation because
it can’t truly be measured in the ‘real
world’. The quantitative academ-
ics recognise that, without being able
to create controlled experiments, the
causality problems of measuring the
cause-of-effects (e.g. the contributions
of different factors to the growth of
discount retailing) are usually insur-
mountable.
In particular, academic research has
focused on the linear consequences
of a single variable, with all other
factors being controlled. Goetz and
Mahoney make the observation that, ‘It
Book reviews
is completely possible to publish highly
regarded research with an R2 of less
than 0.1.’ These quantitative research-
ers have abandoned causes-of-effects
because they can see that the meth-
ods available are not good enough.
However, in rejecting the deficien-
cies of causes-of-effect and multivari-
ate analysis, the academic quantitative
researcher has marginalised the useful-
ness of the findings to potential users.
For example, knowing that two years
of extra schooling has an r-squared
of 0.1 with GDP is of limited use (to
policy makers) without knowing the
interaction of other factors with extra
schooling and the other consequences
of extra schooling.
Qualitative academic research has
focused largely on causes-of-effects,
trying to understand why something
happened. This trade-off prioritises the
usefulness of the findings, but at the
cost of using methods that cannot be
shown to ‘work’ in a rigorous sense.
The book makes a number of inter-
esting comparisons between qualitative
and quantitative research, which high-
light the two cultures of qualitative and
quantitative research. The examples
below are just a few of the many com-
parisons made in the book.
• Across cases or within cases: quan-
titative research is based on aver-
aging measurements across cases.
The findings relate to averages or
groups, they do not seek to explain
what individuals do or experience.
Qualitative research is based largely
on within-case analysis, seeking to
explain individual cases, and to
make wider observations on the
basis of what is learned within these
cases.
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• Causal mechanisms: qualitative
researchers seek to explain the causal
link between variables via process
tracing – that is, by observing the
process in action at the individual
level. Because quantitative research
is typically across cases, process trac-
ing is not often an option. A quan-
titative explanation of the causal
mechanism usually relies on a sta-
tistical test of the population (across
cases) and a theoretical argument.
Goertz and Mahoney observe that,
‘The reasons why variables exert
causal effects are part of the theory,
but not usually included in the sta-
tistical test.’
• Sampling differences: if research-
ers were seeking to understand the
extent to which being tall impacted
some specific behaviour, they would
typically sample a wide range of
heights, approximating to a target
population. By contrast, a typi-
cal qualitative research project
might sample only people close to
the median and people who were
clearly tall. For example, in the
UK, this might mean men around
177 cm (5 ft, 10 in) and men taller
than 190 cm (6 ft, 3 in).
• Symmetry versus asymmetry: in the
quantitative model, if A causes B,
then without A there cannot be B.
By contrast, a qualitative view of
causality is often comfortable with
the proposition that B might be
caused by several factors, such as A,
but also X and Y.
This book is probably not for every
market researcher, but I found it a
good read. On the practical level it
offers only a limited amount in terms
 International Journal of Market Research Vol. 57 Issue 6
of advice for day-to-day research, but it
is a thought-provoking read (and is full
of useful references for further reading)
and I feel I have a much better under-
standing now of some of the theoretical
underpinnings of the things we do.
One of the things highlighted by
the book is a weakness in the way
that most people compare methods.
A typical comparison of qualitative
versus quantitative will compare, for
example, the weaknesses of qualita-
tive with the strengths of quantitative.
A better approach is to compare the
trade-offs required by one with the
trade-offs required by the other, recog-
nising that both fall well short of some
theoretical ideal.
It should also be noted that, since the
book focuses on casual relationships, it
does not cover other areas where mar-
ket researchers often use qualitative
techniques, such as exploration, evalu-
ation and ideation – perhaps topics for
another time?
Ray Poynter
The Future Place
Misbehaving: The making of
behavioral economics
Richard H. Thaler
Allen Lane, 2015
412pp, hardback £20
ISBN 978 1 8461 4403 5
DOI: 10.2501/IJMR-2015-074
The title of Richard Thaler’s new book
refers to our misbehaviour as normal
human beings; our irrationalities and
biases when making all kinds of deci-
sions, from buying stocks and alarm
clocks to assigning faculty offices in a
new building, to home finances.
Richard Thaler is an American
Professor of Behavioral Science and
Economics at the University of Chicago.
He is also the director of the Center for
Decision Research at the University of
Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
He worked with Barack Obama in the
US, and with David Cameron’s ‘Nudge
Unit’ in the UK. He is the co-author
of the international bestseller Nudge:
Improving Decisions about Health,
Wealth, and Happiness.
Misbehaving is partly a professional
autobiography, partly an overview of
the evolution of behavioural econom-
ics. ‘Misbehaving’ is economics meets
psychology.
The title of the first chapter could
very well have been the title of the
book: ‘Supposedly irrelevant factors’.
Thaler starts this opening chapter by
telling the story of students in one of his
classes. The students were upset when
they realised that the average score for
an exam that Thaler had administered
was 72 out of a possible 100. Thaler
thought the students’ reaction odd since
what mattered was the distribution of
the grades, which determined who got
an A, B or C, not the absolute scores.
On the next test, Thaler made the
number of available points 137 instead
of 100. The average score on this sec-
ond, slightly tougher, test was 70%.
But the absolute score was 96 points.
Students were happy. No one com-
plained. Thaler attributes this reaction
to students focusing on the absolute
score, where the average score was in
the 90s, and many scored in the 100s,
and translating a score out of 137 into
percentages was not so obvious.
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