Reasserting the importance of qualitative methods in planning: Fid-Bau Portal

Reasserting the importance of qualitative methods in planning

Gaber, John

AbstractThe goals of this paper are to suggest what is lost by ignoring field research and to reassert the significance of qualitative research methods to the field of urban and regional planning. I assume that methodological choices between quantitative and qualitative methods are a matter of determining which research method is best suited to capture a particular ‘data slice’. Research methods are techniques to retrieve data and carry no theoretical baggage to bias their data set. To illustrate the significance of field research I discuss three points. First, I illustrate some of the technical strengths and weaknesses associated with qualitative research approaches, and highlight three important issues that are lost without field research methods: a link between planning researchers and the people they plan for, quality of life issues, and informal/illegal activity. Second, I propose that by pursuing a mixed-method research methodology, some of the issues lost by ignoring field research methods can be recaptured. Finally, I give an example of how I researched informal street vendors as part of the urban landscape through a mixed-method approach. This paper argues that until planning research re-evaluate what is being lost by their pursuit of quantitative methods, critical problems in the social realm will continue to lack the attention they need from urban and regional planners.Why all that obsession with Method? Because it was through Method that you arrived at the solution... (Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 1989, p. 384)