ABSTRACT
The UK has one of the best-funded and largest, but underused, social science data infrastructures in the world. Its underuse is mainly due to the well documented decline in quantitative methods (henceforth QM) within UK Sociology, and a range of allied social sciences. A decline both as a component of university curricula and as empirical data to inform academic research (see British Academy, 2012; Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE], 2005; Lynch et al., 2007; MacInnes, 2010; McVie, Coxon, Hawkins, Palmer, & Rice, 2008; Parker, Dobson, Scott, Wyman, & Landén, 2008; Rendall, 2003; Williams, Collett, & Rice, 2004). This decline has a multitude of reasons, including:
• a ‘cultural shift’ towards qualitative approaches since the 1960s and a privileging of theorising over empirical analysis (Blane, 2003; Parker et al., 2008);
• ongoing student dissatisfaction with what they perceive to be a ‘difficult’ subject (Williams, Payne, Hodgkinson, & Poade, 2008);
• the marketisation of UK universities, since the last 1990s and its incumbent focus on student ‘experience’ (Scott Jones & Goldring, 2014);
• declining levels of numeracy skills and rising ‘maths anxiety’ (Scott Jones & Goldring, 2014; Vorderman, Budd, Dunne, Hart, & Porkess, 2011).
