Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 11:03:35 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> Qualitative research is okay. But it has to be based on much 
> more than what people say on the forum / Reddit / Hacker news. 
> Following and analyzing the development on GitHub and 
> alternatives would be a start, but even that misses 
> closed-source projects and the underlying reasons on why people 
> come and go. So ideally we want something else too, say 
> interviews.

Interviews would be good, but I think you are putting too much 
faith in research practices. Of the papers I've read, in 90% of 
the cases I would have objections to their conclusions based on 
the methodology (for both qualitative and quantitative methods).

If you don't want to participate in a line of reasoning, of 
course, you don't have to. In general, researchers tend to be 
very open to explore ideas in the way we do in this thread, so I 
don't quite share your objection to ranting. When you explore 
ideas through a line of reasoning then other people can choose to 
dig into it, find new angles and ideas following from it, or they 
can ignore it.

But qualitiative analysis is an exploration. You don't aim to 
grade impact in a predictive manner, you try to unfold many 
different aspects of a process so that you can form a model of 
what might influence it. Also bringing nuances into an analysis 
is a very important aspect where quantitative methods shine. Then 
you also have interpretative research applying models of power 
etc to situations.

The world is not black and white. You don't have to wait for 
someone to do formal data collection to explore the nuances of 
the situation.