Week 16: Why Quantitative research is a wrong fit in informing the human development agenda

The mind frame that ideas are formed on one side of the globe and tested on another should not sit well with any human development policy maker worth their salt.

Yet, this is the common thrust of the dominant positivist quantitative research paradigm that has been informing solutions to social phenomena such as unemployment, inadequate housing, poverty and economic renewal in the global south.

Theories on how economics and finance should be are therefore predominantly generated in the global north , curated into elegant formulas, prescribed in intricate step by step methodology, and then imported to be tested in the 'other' social setting.

The experiments are designed to test the 'goodness of fit' of pre-modeled theories in "new waters". When (inevitably) the reality does not fit to the elegant formulation - reality is panel beaten, smoothed to fit in and the gaps explained as financial illiteracy, incompetence, corruption or timing differences ("you will eventually get here therefore let us keep conditioning this ultimate truth that you desire towards")

This is not to say that a positivist quantitative research paradigm is wrong. Not at all. It has its place and is especially suited to the physical sciences world - astronomy, physics, chemistry, meteorology, geology. Classic formulas like Newtons Laws of motion, Law of gravitation and Einstein's mass - energy equivalence are universally perceivable, testable and applicable to the whole of the non - living physical order of the universe.

In a parallel thought, classic formulas are generated to explain human connected behavior like the Black-Scholes-Merton to price financial instruments. Whereas these may hold true within a controlled defined human context (predicated on the social setup, the way the underlying assets such as land, housing, companies are identified, defined and valued), the extrication from their social setting and blind testing to nascent financial markets such as the Nairobi securities exchange(NSE) is ill- informed.

This may be a better explanation of the stunted growth for many stock exchange markets in the 'other' world where the elegant formulas do not make sense beyond a very insular elitist framework of the portion of the economy strongly linked to the formula generating self primarily through multinational corporations. Beyond that little pond, these formulas make little sense in application to lived realities for the majority.

For this majority we have to take the same step back as was taken before the elegant formula's were crafted in that other side of the globe - an indepth qualitative, context aware inquiry to deeply understand why the socio - economic life make sense to those that are actually experiencing it. Then and only then can we possibly generate meaningful ideas and formulas that can then contribute to meaningful human development for our reality.