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 wore a smile when seeing it.
Recently, I started thinking about the quote a lot but couldn’t retrieve the full version and that bothered me. After 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.”
Interestingly, this quote is oftentimes wrongly credited to Albert Einstein (Cullis, 2017). The original source was explained in a book, which was a hard find. The books is entitled as Informal sociology: A casual introduction to sociological thinking, written by William Bruch Cameron, published in 1963, and the quote is on page 13.
Doing research is to offer provisional answers to what is happening, and the traditions (or paradigm if we were to use academic term) has evolved over the years. Before mid-1900, the voice of hard science was high, everything has to be proved, numbers need to be provided, and hypotheses should be tested. Gradually starting from 1950s, deep observations, interviews became methods that can be used and interpretation of data collected is welcome (i.e., answers from the participant can be interpreted not strictly using hard numbers to prove).
Yesterday when I sat in on a talk about using SQL to analyze data in the field of User Experience (or UX), the speaker Dr. Carl Pearson mentioned something really important. He said, back to the very beginning in early 2010, UX research is bound to be mix-method, that is, researchers not only use quantitative methods, but also qualitative methods. Gradually, it started having the dichotomy of quant versus quali, and now it is oscillating back to the mix-method tradition. He stated that no matter what, one should be able to use both, regardless of your research background.
My research training mostly landed on qualitative research, but I remember several years ago, my readings were full of p values and hypotheses testing. Recently I’m going back to review my knowledge on statistics, and hope to report more on that matter regarding qualitative researchers re-training themselves to be mix-method researcher.
By the way, if you are on the look out for the quote and you are 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
Wang (2020). Performance Studies and Communication. (More to be added).
First created on 2025/03/30, updated on 2025/06/26.