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Educational researchers have claimed that the quantitative and qualitative approaches to educational inquiry are, indeed, compatible. However, it would be unfortunate to discontinue this debate. The quantitative-qualitative debate began with the interpretive approach to social inquiry. Dilthey argued that since cultural/moral sciences differ from natural/physical sciences, the context of the human experimenters ' subjectivity, emotions, and values is significant. Concerned by inconsistent research interpretations, Weber unsuccessfully tried to synthesize a compromise between the two perspectives. Still, two distinct perspectives remained: the quantitative, realistic tradition describing independently existing social reality as it really is, and the qualitative, interpretive tradition assuming that social reality is mind-constructed according to internal coherence and socia