ABSTRACT
Ask a British psychologist what s/he considers to be the hottest topic in psychological research methods at present, and s/he is most likely to answer something along the lines of ‘the qualitative/quantitative debate’. Judging by the content of The Psychologist (the journal of the British Psychological Society) during the 1990s, this would appear to be the case. The pros and cons of qualitative methods gained more coverage than any other methodological issue during that decade. Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association's journal – the American Psychologist – ran many articles on a quite different methodological debate; whether or not null hypothesis significance testing should remain the dominant statistical approach in psychology.
