ABSTRACT
Discovering Q – a personal story “Qualitative data are sexy” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 1) Eden, Donaldson, and Walker (2005) identified that the growth of qualitative
methodologies within human geography, such as focus groups and in-depth interviewing, sometimes conflicted with the desires of research end-users and funding bodies, particularly in the area of policy development. Here, they commented, those who wanted to use the results of research for further development often sought to legitimize the work through the insistence of the presence of numerical data. In many ways, this observation echoed an earlier geographical debate, prompted by Massey (1999), which identified the role of “physics envy” within certain sections of the geographical community. Here, she focused upon the “soft” versus “hard” debate amongst geographers, usually conceptualized as the human/soft versus physical/hard divide. At the heart of this debate, it would seem, is the way in which human and physical geographers often work with and collect data, partly enshrined within the quantitative/qualitative “paradigm war” (Denzin, 2010).
