When Numbers Cast a Shadow

                                     When Numbers Cast a Shadow

This week, I was revisiting a confusion that took me years to untangle.

Most confusion around qualitative research, I now believe, arises when we try to understand it through the terminology and assumptions of quantitative research. We carry concepts from one paradigm into another and then wonder why things do not fit. I remember going through a similar phase during my PhD. After the initial few years of confusion, I slowly began to understand how the language of quantitative research often overshadows our understanding of qualitative research. One such word was sampling.

For a long time, I used the term without questioning it. Then, at some point, I realised that for my research, the word was almost meaningless. Sampling is useful when we want to make predictions about a population. My purpose was entirely different. I was trying to illuminate the process of teaching and learning in a social science classroom. I was not predicting anything. I was trying to understand something deeply.

I eventually discovered that the more appropriate word for me was site. The classroom was my site. It was the place where the phenomenon I wanted to understand was unfolding. I was working with 43 students. By the end of the study, I could collect only 26 notebooks, and even those contained irregular entries. For a very long time, I was afraid of questions such as: Why did all 43 students not write? Why did some write more than others? Why were the entries uneven?

These questions troubled me because I was still looking at my work through a quantitative lens.

Much later, I realised that in my case, who wrote and for how many days was not the most important question. During analysis, what mattered was the thickness of the data and what was written in it. The richness of the entries mattered more than their uniformity.

This week, I was engaged in a discussion that brought back these memories.

The conversation revolved around reflective writing by students. We discussed how to select participants, how to ensure that children write regularly, what kinds of questions should be asked, and even whether students would understand what reflection actually means. There was also a discussion on whether the format should be structured or semi-structured. We finally decided that one half would be structured and the other half would remain open-ended.

It was a fruitful discussion.

At the same time, I could clearly see how quantitative thinking quietly enters research conversations and begins to shape them. A significant part of the discussion revolved around numbers. What if 100 students write initially and later only 40 continue? How would that affect the research? How would this be explained? These concerns are perfectly valid within a quantitative framework. But they do not carry the same weight in qualitative research.

In qualitative work, the important question is not how many students wrote or for how many days they wrote. Once the data comes together, what matters is the text itself. If the notebooks collectively contain one lakh words, then those words are the data. What becomes important is what has been written, not necessarily who wrote it or how frequently.

The emphasis shifts from counting responses to understanding meanings. I am increasingly able to see these differences everywhere.

The same happened when we discussed reflection questions. There was a concern that the questions should align very closely with what we intended to capture. Once again, I could see the influence of quantitative thinking. I argued that it is perfectly fine to begin with research questions, but qualitative inquiry is always open. Sometimes we do not find what we initially set out to find. Instead, we discover something entirely unexpected.

And, those unexpected discoveries become valuable insights.

Of course, this openness demands a willingness to take risks. It requires researchers to sit with uncertainty. For young researchers, this can be difficult. Research is also a journey of developing confidence in one's methodological choices. But I did share my own experience and how long it took me to recognise the shadow that quantitative assumptions can cast on our understanding of qualitative research. Perhaps that is one of the important lessons of research—not merely learning methods, but learning when the assumptions of one method stop us from seeing the possibilities of another.