Quantitative research papers are often labeled as foreign “eight-part essays,” a Chinese boilerplate writing and literary composition style that is rigid in form and lacking in ideas. A common criticism is that most of the papers follow a fixed format guided by Western academic styles. They are filled with a variety of formulas, tables and dry jargon disconnected from real life, which is full of diverse individuals and vivid language.

However, these form problems are irrelevant compared to other bad tendencies in the aspects of developing research questions, concept refinement, indexes for measurement and other basic procedures, which might plunge quantitative research into stereotypical and statistics-oriented forms.

In my opinion, quantitative research plays a vital role in the development and promotion of the social sciences, and its usefulness cannot be denied, but worship of statistics and a method-driven approach should be avoided.

Academic research should be problem oriented because a pointless research question, without practical or academic importance, cannot create a dialogue with the previous studies, so its value will be limited. But the key is how scholars can transform the questions that interest them into ones with academic value.

Some researchers are accustomed to staying in the ivory tower to identify questions through beat data, meaning that they neither fully understand society nor have specific directions or ideas at the start of research. Instead, they rely on data—mostly second-hand data— to find correlation between variables, establish some research questions and then analyze data. Therefore, the data-oriented research adopts the approach from data to data and as long as you master some statistical skills, you can finish a paper with rigid structure, reasonable argument and perfect conclusion in your study, but it should be noted that the paper lacks the real vitality, and its academic life will come to an end at the moment of publication.

After proposing research questions, they need to be upgraded to the analytical level through conceptualization, so the theoretical tension of research questions is indispensable. A logical method of deduction is rarely used to test the research topic in quantitative research, because of its empirical inclination, causing some research questions to lack social imagination or theoretical insight. But complex social phenomena require concepts to deal with the variability of social facts and the social context, so it is hard to find the connection point and strike a balance between data analysis and theoretical explanation. This generates a tension if not dealt with properly and even leads to two bad tendencies.

One tendency is that when it comes to a question, researchers will search for concepts in the existing theories. The more authoritative the sources and the greater the prestige of the authors, the more likely it is that the concepts will be used. Creating new concepts to cater to data is the other tendency, which should not be criticized. Still, high standards for constructing concepts must be required. New concepts should closely reflect reality and not be ambiguous. Their intension and extension need to be defined explicitly.

If new concepts, constructed randomly, cannot achieve the aforementioned requirements, the complexity of the study will be increased, and its analytical ability will be decreased.

 

Wei Qinggong is an assistant researcher at the Bureau of Scientific Research Management of the Chinese Academy of Social Science.