Bisworanjan - it depends on which angle you view the issue and what discipline you sit in. There is a place for all worldviews. While the paradigm tension of quantitative versus qualitative is still there - it should be less visible than it was 10-years ago. Partly, we have mixed methods to thanks for that. Rather than quantitative versus qualitative - think quantitative and qualitative together!!

Bisworanjan - it depends on which angle you view the issue and what discipline you sit in. There is a place for all worldviews. While the paradigm tension of quantitative versus qualitative is still there - it should be less visible than it was 10-years ago. Partly, we have mixed methods to thanks for that. Rather than quantitative versus qualitative - think quantitative and qualitative together!!

I agree with Dean, the approaches are very different, but they are both valid and valuable, and the quality of application depends on understanding their internal rigour in relation to what you are trying to explain/understand/predict. The substantive application is is important. I am not however yet convinced by what is claimed to be be mixed methods ( both articles and book length teaching texts) as they are rather naive and would not pass the quality bar from the alternative. I am on the quantitative side and the quantitative stuff is often 50 plus years behind the cutting edge. An exception on the teaching/ exposition side is

Seawright, J. (2016). Multi-Method Social Science: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Tools (Strategies for Social Inquiry). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316160831

written by someone who really understands both range of approaches and how they can be effectively combined in a state of the art way, that it is not saying just horses for courses but how they can be integrated to bring greater power to causal inference, thus it is a

" systematic guide to designing multi-method research. It argues that methods can be productively combined using the framework of integrative multi-method research, with one method used to carry out a final causal inference, and methods from other traditions used to test the key assumptions involved in that causal inference. In making this argument, Jason Seawright considers a wide range of statistical tools including regression, matching, and natural experiments. The book also discusses qualitative tools including process tracing, the use of causal process observations, and comparative case study research. "

And this book is critical of much qualitative practice:

Stephen Gorard 2013 Research Design: Creating Robust Approaches

and you may want to look at contemporary social science quantitative stuff in this article and its follow up

Article Mutual misunderstanding and avoidance, misrepresentations an...

Article One step forward but two steps back to the proper appreciati...

My expertise is in quantitative analysis but am not a positivist, see

Chapter The practice of quantitative methods

You are true Dear Sir Dean Whitehead and Kelvyn Jones there should be both qualitative and quantitative research which you called mixed method. I see the excessive quantification which somehow dominate over the qualitative analysis. The value of participant observation and case studies is going down day by day.

Bisworanjan Behuria Here, you state that qualitative is important. But you offer no argument why that is the case. How extreme do you want to be? Is a case study of a single person useful? How do you know? What if the person or people you are studying don't represent anything to which you can generalize? In those cases, is qualitative work still useful? is it useful for everything?

Really, shouldn't choosing a quantitative or qualitative approach, or a mixed approach, be based on the question being asked? Shouldn't the question drive the method? Why would it make sense to pick a method first? How much does choosing a particular method also depend on how one has been trained?

These are really all very basic questions that have been debated in the literature in many different fields.