This chapter focuses on the age-old debate in the social sciences about the primacy of methods and the relationship of our Pioneers to one of the main ideological battles blighting disciplines such as sociology. There are a variety of methods that are used in the social sciences to uncover different questions. They can be grouped into two main strands – qualitative methods (involving participant observation, structured in-depth interviews, unstructured interviews, and focus groups) and quantitative methods (such as secondary survey data analysis, and experimental methods) with a backbone of usually inferential statistical techniques. Every researcher makes a conscious decision to adopt a method in their social enquiry and it would have been extremely unusual for the Pioneers not to engage with a sometimes oppressive responsibility to pick a ‘side’, and the dogmatic prescription to stick with it.

For some of the Pioneers, the primacy of one of the methods over the other is undoubted. As we have seen, John Goldthorpe led two of the key projects in post-war British sociology, first on the Affluent Worker and then on social mobility. He became one of the strongest supporters of quantitative methods; and homage to survey techniques underlies the active current of his interview, and indeed of his career. He argues clearly for the importance of quantification in sociology to bring the discipline to scientific rigour. John sees British sociology as weakened by the debate and the rejection of positivism. In his own words:

Importantly, John was highly aware of how his academic standpoint brought him into an ideological war with his colleagues who were less interested in quantification, and ultimately brought about isolation from British sociology.