Method and Substance

by Robert Small, 1990

The separation of method from substance in the social sciences is intellectually stultifying as well as economically costly. It has resulted in a self-sustaining "methodological" literature read only by methodologists discussing methods that have never been shown to work because their sponsors have never been responsible for solving actual substantive problems. Successful methodological development has almost always involved intimate interaction between methods experts and substantive investigators (sometimes an interaction going on within a single cranium). Otis Dudley Duncan Published in Volume 1 of Surveying Subjective Phenomena, 1984.