One basic dilemma of social research concerns the aggregation of data. Combining information from different sources and different individuals is necessary in order to arrive at a composite picture; indeed, this is the essence of the ‘quantitative’ method. But, in the process of doing this, the uniqueness of individual standpoints – the core of the ‘qualitative’ method – is sacrificed. People become numbers. The consequences of this process for the women who took part in the SSPO study are outlined in Chapter 9, which reproduces the paper reporting the main quantitative findings published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1990. Accompanying this paper in Chapter 9 is a text exploring the notion of ‘hard’ data which is so often held up as a distinguishing mark of the quantitative method. But the contrast between differently textured data – the ‘hard’ data of one method, the ‘soft’ data of the other – is linked with other issues, including that of the use of statistical tests. What is ‘significant’ according to statistical tests may be a product – an artefact – of the aggregative method. It may be a ‘chance’ finding, of no significance in terms of the personal meaning of everyday life. People themselves may speak of connections between aspects of their lives which are not revealed by tests of statistical significance. In this sense, ‘qualitative’ material is able to uncover the nature of social processes – why and how variables are linked the way they ‘are’. It may also, of course, suggest ideas to be explored by manipulating and testing quantitative data – ideas which spring from the sociological imagination rather than from the preformed templates of the statistical method.

One necessity in dissolving the dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative research methods is to reframe the relationship between aggregated data and individual standpoints as dialectical. The two stand in relation to one another as equal participants in a conversation; now one speaks, then another.