Whilst I've been away ....

In the intervening interval I've been getting my head round numbers.  This is an interesting exercise, and one that has also made very clear to me what the discipline in Disciplines is all about.  The actual problem I've been wrestling with is how to make sense of the statistical data I had laboriously collected on "payment by results" from the Committee of Council on Education's Annual Reports, presented to parliament between 1862 and 1872.

The data are really in the form of accounts.  They enable parliament to see what monies had been spent on education - so there is always a global sum; how much had gone to which provider - until 1870 these were all religious bodies operating either in Scotland or in England and Wales; and how much of the money had been spent on the categories of staff, buildings or equipment.  From 1862 the money handed over for running costs was tied to the numbers of children attending school and whether or not they had been entered for exams, arranged as Standards I-VI.  The exams tested reading, writing and arithmetic, or the three Rs, an expression which dates from this period.  This is the system known as payment by results.

Dealing with the quantitative data through statistical analysis is a discipline in so far as it entails putting to one side a concern for what the numbers stand for and focusing on what the numbers themselves show. As a person inhabiting a qualitative tradition, this runs counter to most of what I know and do.  Leaping over the disciplinary boundary to work in their terms means understanding the discipline built into that other tradition. That's where my ethnographic training comes in, I guess, in terms of trying to understand this other way of going about knowledge-making. It's hard work.

All Disciplines bring some issues into focus whilst dispensing with others.  Quantitative traditions are neither more nor less stringent in this respect.  But the rules that govern the relationships between what is in focus - only numerical data - are different.  One of the things I think I've learnt from struggling with the exercise is quite how aware quantitative traditions are of the uncertainty built into the numbers; and the inherently constructed nature of the numbers that represent the data in the analysis.  Precisely because they know the numbers can be used to assert many different things, the discipline of statistics has an enormous number of rules about how the numbers can be used, and what the results of the analysis can be taken for.  Indeed, they recognise very clearly that the analysis creates the findings.  You could argue that it's the caution in the discipline that determines the genre to the written account: the way the findings get written up with an emphasis on exactly how data reduction and then the analysis have been conducted that is seldom matched within qualitative traditions. 

One further insight that flows from this is the misuse of quantitative data in public discourse.  In public discourse the inherent uncertainty in the numbers is overlooked and ignored.  Public discourse turns numbers into "facts".  How far statistics itself is aware of what happens when their work travels in this way across the boundaries to their specialised knowledge field elsewhere is for me an interesting question.