ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Blumer's criticisms of statistical method and quantitative measurement, and then examine the assumptions that underlie these criticisms. It examines Blumer's critique of the growing use of quantitative method in the social sciences and of the ideas underlying this use. The chapter discusses what seem to me to be the three major assumptions on which his critique is founded: realism; symbolic interactionism; and critical commonsensism. It is these assumptions that mark Blumer's position off from that of the sociological positivists and from that of many quantitative researchers. Blumer's views are, of course, encapsulated in symbolic interactionism. Much of Blumer's criticism of quantitative method relies on the idea that human social phenomena differ in character from physical objects, and that understanding them requires a different approach, in some respects at least, from that characteristic of the physical sciences.
