ABSTRACT
From the 1920s onwards, there was increasing debate within US sociology about the role of what were then regarded as the two main social research methods: case study and statistics. As we saw, this debate took place both within the Chicago department and outside. At times it became intense. For some the issue involved, in today’s parlance, a choice between competing paradigms, only one of which was scientific. For others, it was a matter of different methods with characteristic strengths and weaknesses that suited different research problems. There is no doubt, however, that by the 1950s, broadly speaking, quantitative methods, in the form of survey research, had become the dominant sociological approach and that case study had become a minority practice (Platt 1986).
