Title: Why is quantitative analysis useful?
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Introduction to Quantitative Analysis

Why is quantitative analysis useful?

Fundamentally, this course aims to equip you with an ability to understand, create and critique numerical evidence concerning the social and political world. Having this ability is very important because:

- In our everyday lives, such evidence is all around us. Politicians use it to support their own policies and proposals, or to criticise those of their political opponents. The media use it to inform a vast array of news stories,including the state of the economy and our schools, health scares, the incidence of crime, and the fluctuations of the housing market. Social and political interest groups use it to support their own agendas, for example in arguing what the public ‘really’ think about issues such as the rights of gay people. Such evidence is often questionable and sometimes deeply flawed in its production and/or presentation. Being able to understand,critically evaluate, challenge and (maybe) produce your own evidence about social and political life is essential to making you a good citizen and, perhaps, a valuable employee.

- One of the reasons why quantitative evidence is so widely used is that it is well-suited to providing information about large and complex entities (populations, societies,economies etc.). Another way of expressing this is that, done well, quantitative analysis rates highly on ‘generalisability’: the evidence it creates allows us to draw conclusions about our wider societies and polities.
- From a more academic perspective, our substantive interests as social and political scholars and researchers usually precede, and have greater significance than, our interests and abilities with regard to different kinds of evidence. That is to say, most of us are interested in, e.g., nationalism in general rather than only interested in, e.g., surveys or ethnographic work concerning nationalism. Since numerical evidence can be produced with regard to just about any field of academic interest in social and political science, closing yourself off from such evidence can place you at a disadvantage. You do not need to be an ‘expert’ in all approaches to social and political research, but you should at least be able to engage with evidence arising from different approaches, including numerical evidence.
- A related reason is that having an understanding of quantitative analysis and numerical evidence will equip you to judge when such an approach to certain questions or issues is appropriate and when it is not, either before of after the fact. It is not our purpose in this course to present quantitative analysis as an invariably (or even predominantly) ‘superior’ approach to the creation of evidence about the social and political world – far from it. Like other approaches, it has strengths and weaknesses, and is most definitely unsuited to certain types of enquiry.
- Finally, and related to all the other reasons above, advances in technology mean that it is now easier to do quantitative analysis than it has ever been. It is easier to create quantitative data, to access vast reserves of data created by others, and to analyse such data without the need for any advanced mathematical skills. The corollary is that it is also easier to do this badly or inappropriately! The course aims to help you to do and/or interpret quantitative analysis appropriately and well.