He never grappled with the rigours of quantitative techniques.
More recently, new quantitative techniques and the splintering of subjects into ever narrower specialties have revived fears that narrative history -- the readable kind -- is fast becoming, well, history.
Much greater insights into teenagers can be gained through the study of literature (from Romeo and Juliet to Trainspotting) than from the quantitative techniques of experimental psychology.
Such students gain knowledge of different kinds of approaches to examining social phenomena … many modules taught by the department centre on the use of quantitative techniques.
A study published last year in The Financial Review found that enhanced index funds that use quantitative techniques outperformed their benchmarks, on average, from 1981 to 2000.
But the improvement that would count would involve not the refinement of quantitative techniques (which will surely happen), but the establishing of a relationship between quantitative techniques, however improved, and qualitative insights.
One is a growing acceptance of quantitative techniques by mainstream investors, such as pension funds and even retail mutual funds.
An annual ranking of the biggest moneymakers in the hedge fund industry was topped by Jim Simons, a chain-smoking 70-year-old mathematics professor whose sophisticated quantitative techniques for rapid-fire trading netted him $2.5bn£1.7bnbn).
Quantitative techniques emerged in the early 1970's and gave birth to the index fund in 1971, when Wells Fargo introduced a mutual fund that tracked 1,500 stocks on the New York Stock Exchange.
Or, to put it another way, between positivists who rely on quantitative techniques and objective measures when assessing social life and phenomenologists who attach greater importance to subjective experience and emotion.
He computed the target's value using five different quantitative techniques.
