‘World-systems analysts are not against quantification per se (they would quantify what can usefully be quantified), but (as the old joke about the drunk teaches us) they feel that one should not look for the lost key only under the street lamp just because the light is better (where there are more quantifiable data). One searches for the most appropriate data in function of the intellectual problem; one doesn’t choose the problem because hard, quantitative data are available’ (from Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction).
Quite right, and one reason why public health (and too much) sociological research doesn’t encompass the ‘greedy bastards’ who populate the class-driven governing oligarchy/plutocracy that is the primary cause of the maldistrubution of health