Long before I became a director of children’s services, in the annals of history, I studied for a degree in combined sciences. In that quantitative world, numbers and data were always important to collect and analyse, empirical measurement was vital to help you understand what was happening in the world.
Over the years, I have come to realise more and more that quantitative data, though sometimes important, needs detailed understanding from qualitative research to establish its meaning.
There are reasons for this; quantitative data gives you a partial picture, it can be biased, it can lead to inaccurate conclusions and can drive the wrong behaviours. Many times, in my job, I have looked at indicators or performance reports with everything purportedly ‘green’ only to find that in practice things were not as good as you might have thought.
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