Методологически поглед върху качествените методи в социологическото изследване
A Methodological Look at Qualitative Methods in the Sociological Survey

Summary/Abstract: This article offers various arguments in support of the idea that the usual division of research methods of information gathering, processing, and analysis into quantitative and qualitative is incorrect. It would be closer to the truth to refer to numerical and non-numerical methods, where the non-numerical may be called qualitative, and the numerical may be divided into quantitative and qualitative. Moreover, in social surveys, due to the nature of traits and dependencies involved in the analysis, we should only refer to qualitative methods. For a number of reasons, the usually applied statistical means of data processing and data analysis in surveys involve a number of constraints and make substantial generalization more difficult. Moreover, a genuinely sociological explanation of the surveyed phenomena or social processes that are the topic of study is not attained through them. Interpretation of survey information usually comes down to a superficial interpretation of the formal processing results. This situation requires the application of methods that are qualitative in the commonly accepted sense. They include the methods of so-called „warm“ sociology. The author briefly discusses the use of some of these methods and their substantial results. However, the interpreting, and especially the generalizing, of results is done in a quite subjective way. The liberty of interpretation rather leads to unscientific arguments that only serve to ground the researcher’s own authority. A possible way to at least partially overcome the subjective interpretation of „qualitative“ survey results is to „mathematize“ them. The author points out some possible and available means for such a procedure: by building scales; shifting from percentages to score values; „digitizing“ (shifting from non-metric to metric scales); through expert assessments, viewed as a variant of the „operations analysis“ methods. Once the scales are built, it becomes possible to use various statistical methods, for instance „path“ analysis. In any case, the application of mathematical means would lead to more precise grounding of sociological conclusions.

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