another confounding
Leigh Star (s-star1 who-is-at uiuc.edu)
Thu, 20 Nov 1997 13:00:06 -0600
I haven't said much on the qual-quant front since some scar tissue takes a
long time to heal (my home discipline is sociology). But one useful
distinction I've found, I think echoed in something Jay said in the
biographies postings, is between formal and empirical. Some qualitative
work tends to have formal properties or models embedded in it. This is not
well understood, as qualitative/empirical and quantiative/formal are
usually conflated. When people try to talk about the formal in the
qualitative, it usually becomes a discussion of generalizability -- not the
same thing.
Oddly, it's been in working with designers that the confusion gets unstuck,
as useful formal models emerge from ethnographic studies in a more obvious
way.
L*
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Susan Leigh Star
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
501 East Daniel St. University of Illinois
Champaign, IL 61820 USA s-star1 who-is-at uiuc.edu