Years ago, when I was a student at UH Mānoa, my program had a session on doing Qualitative Research and I was the host. I was struck by a quote that explained why qualitative research was important and where it stands with the “all-number” quantitative research. I put the quote on the first slide and many colleagues liked it.
Recently, I started thinking about the quote a lot but couldn’t retrieve the full version and that bothered me. After doing some digging of my writings, I finally found it in Wang (2020).
The quote is “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Originally, I found the quote from a research method book from which the name I will dig later.
Interestingly, this quote is oftentimes wrongly credited to Albert Einstein (Cullis, 2017). I found the original source from a book called Informal sociology: A casual introduction to sociological thinking by William Bruch Cameron, published in 1963. If you go to page 13, you will see the quote. Apparently according to my notes, this book was hard to find.
If you are on the look out for the quote and having difficulty, hopefully this very short writing can be of help. If you find this information inaccurate, please do leave me a message.
Reference
Cameron, W. B. (1963). Informal Sociology, a Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking. Random House.
Cullis, J. O. (2017). Not everything that can be counted counts….. British Journal of Haematology, 177(4), 505–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjh.14626
