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Rather than bemoaning the demise of quantitative analysis in the social sciences ("Time to crunch some numbers", January ), it might be more useful to try to understand why this might have happened.

I have experienced much of the soulless, atomising positivism masquerading as science during my doctoral research in the 1970s and 1980s.

And being exposed almost daily to the crudity with which the Government uses statistics in social, educational and eco-nomic realms, I find it not at all surprising that more meaningful qualitative research methods are in the ascendancy in the social sciences.

Richard House
Roehampton University