Quantitative and qualitative scholars hold tacitly different models of what a concept is

Evidence

I propose that the basic difference between a qualitative and a quantitative scholar’s thinking about concepts lies in the (implicit) use of the disease-symptom model for concepts by the latter group and the use of ontological approaches by the former. In other words, qualitative scholars tend to think of concepts (when they are not distracted by the problem of developing indicators or quantitative measures) in terms of their ontological properties. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 407

Categorization

• SEED: Essay: ‘The Disease-Symptom Model of Everything’ — how latent-variable thinking colonized social science vocabulary.