“At first, trigger happy, I retweet it (Mike Caulfield will kill me) then I stop and unretweet it coz I realize I don’t agree with it” — I like how I’m the Ghost of Bad Retweets Past. 😉

I think (as is clear to you as well) that a lot of this is not just quantitative positivism, but *bad* quantitative positivism. It fails even on its own terms. The thing is a good, contextually aware positivist approach is really useful to some things. But man, there are so many crap ones. There are some decent methods to tease out confounds in quantitative research and get at something that resembles truth. But for whatever reason when we bring social science into the public arena we just always seem to drop those methods.

The thing is, I think the problem is demand-driven. There’s a decent number of people that can do and produce good quantitative work. But the problem is that in education very often better work is not rewarded over inferior work, so we end up with this whole array (as Matt notes) of crap studies that maybe say something that might be useful if you squint enough and overlook a dozen issues. We get crappy quantitative studies because we are crappy consumers of studies.