Quantitative research continues to receive outsized attention in educational research, policy, and practice arenas (Garcia, et al., 2018). This is due, in part, to calls for rigorous large-scale research that has the capacity to make causal claims, and reduce large amounts of numerical data to trends and averages for large samples and subgroups. Further, quantitative research is commonly perceived as “objective,” based on seemingly neutral data that can lead to increased accountability and successful educational reform (Gillborn, et al. 2018).

 However, scholars from around the globe have long-critiqued how numbers, categories, codes, and statistical approaches have been used as tools of oppression that perpetuate inequities (e.g., Arrellano, 2022). The decisions that policy makers and researchers make about what data to collect, how to analyze data, and how to interpret and report results are never neutral, as when researchers try to attribute the effects of racism to inherent qualities of particular racial and ethnic groups (Gillborn et al., 2018). Scholars argue that quantitative research has failed to adequately address questions related to diversity, including individuals’ complex and intersectional identities, leading to damaging outcomes for minoritized groups (e.g., Keenan, 2022; Sablan, 2019; Viano & Baker, 2020).

To address these concerns, over the past fifteen years, researchers have developed frameworks for conducting critical and quantitative research in education that explicitly aim to offer nuance on labels and categories, shed light on inequitable opportunities, advance social justice, and disrupt oppressive educational practices (e.g., Gillborn et al., 2018; Viano & Baker, 2020). These frameworks include critical quantitative methods (Stage, 2007); critical race quantitative intersectionality (Covarrubias et al., 2017); and QuantCrit [Quantitative Critical Race Theory] (Gillborn et al., 2018). Along these lines, quantitative researchers have also adapted frameworks traditionally used in qualitative research to better understand the experiences of specific groups or the effects of particular types of categorization, including TribalCrit (Sabzalian et al., 2021), LatCrit (Covarrubias & Lara, 2014), DisCrit (Cruz et al., 2021), and Queer Theory (Curley, 2019). As a result, there is a growing body of research that applies principles and frameworks in critical and quantitative research in education.

In this review of the literature, we synthesize 62 empirical peer-reviewed publications, published between 2008 - 2022, that are framed by critical and quantitative perspectives. Specifically, we apply Banks’s (2006) “characteristics of multicultural (transformative” research,” to analyze the ways in which critical and quantitative frameworks have been operationalized, the methodological decisions that aim to shed light on educational inequities when conducting research on diversity, and the tensions that arise when conducting critical and quantitative research in education.  The following questions guide this review: 

• How does critical and quantitative research address questions that are of concern to historically marginalized and minoritized groups?

• What methodological decisions do critical and quantitative researchers make as they attempt to describe the experiences, values, and perspectives of marginalized groups in accurate, valid, and sensitive ways?

• What are the intended and unintended consequences of critical and quantitative research in education? 

Drawing on Banks’s (2006) questions for multicultural and transformative research, in the full paper, we address tensions that arise at every stage of the research process, from collecting and accessing data, to analyzing and reporting data. Due to space limitations, we describe tensions related to collecting and accessing quantitative data in this proposal, and ways in which researchers used critical and quantitative frameworks to try to address those tensions. 

To identify literature for this review, we searched electronic databases including the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC), Google Scholar, and ProQuest, using the terms “critical quantitative” “quantitative critical,” or “quantcrit” and “education,” filtered by “peer-reviewed.” We looked for empirical articles published between 2008 - 2022, marking the time since significant conceptual articles on critical and quantitative perspectives were published (e.g., Stage, 2007, Gillborn, et al., 2018). We also conducted electronic searches of journals that published special issues on quantitative and critical perspectives (e.g. Race Ethnicity and Education) and traced research that cited major conceptual publications on quantitative and critical perspectives. This search process initially yielded 108 publications. As we identified literature, we read the abstracts of articles to select those that were empirical, peer-reviewed, and applied critical and quantitative frameworks, and were published in English. We included studies that clearly documented the purpose of the study, participants, data sources, analyses, and findings. We excluded studies that employed qualitative or mixed methods because those methods have a longer tradition of using critical frameworks; we wanted to understand how researchers are attempting to conduct critical and quantitative research, specifically. From there, we identified 62 studies that met our criteria, noting the increase in the number of publications over the past five years. We found that the majority of the empirical research took place in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. We created a spreadsheet with detailed information for each study, including the focus (e.g., racism, sexism, science, higher education) and purpose, as well as notes on the study’s methodological decisions related to collecting, accessing, analyzing, and reporting on quantitative data from critical perspectives. We also charted how each study defined and operationalized critical and quantitative research. Each author charted a subset of studies, and we met regularly to discuss tensions we found at each stage of conducting critical and quantitative research. At each phase of the research process, we analyzed how the the quantitative and critical research addressed Banks’s (2006) key questions related to multicultural and transformative research, including: “Who has power to define groups and institutionalize [quantitative] concepts?; What is the relationship between [quantitative] knowledge and power?; Who benefits from the ways in which key concepts are defined? [And] How does the positionality of the researchers influence the research” (p. 775 - 776).

Across the literature, researchers identified distinct, but related, tensions when conducting critical and quantitative research on diversity in education and proposed solutions for addressing those concerns. Due to space limitations, we briefly discuss tensions related to collecting quantitative data as an example in our findings. We will expand upon that discussion and also address tensions related to operationalizing frameworks, and to analyzing and reporting on quantitative data in the final paper. Statistical analyses often require researchers to essentialize diverse groups in order to create categories for analysis. To address this problem, researchers have turned the lens of inquiry onto the creation of categories (Gillborn et al., 2018) and recommend conducting research into how individuals’ self-identification with different categories changes over time rather than assuming it is fixed and static (Viano & Baker, 2020). For example, quantitative research requires creating categories for analysis, yet, as Gillborn et al (2018) point out “categories are neither ‘natural’ nor given” ( p. 169). Rather than taking commonly-used categories for granted, the research we reviewed attempted to better understand participants’ complex, multifaceted identities through: 1) increasing the number of categories used for analysis (e.g., Wronowski et al., 2022 allowed participants to write-in how they identified rather than select from pre-determined categories); 2) using two categories for comparative purposes but changing who the “reference” group was to avoid centering the experiences of dominant groups (e.g., Fong et al., 2019 compared the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students); or 3) focusing on the heterogeneous experiences of one group in order to avoid comparisons across groups (e.g., Young et al., 2018) described the math achievement trajectory of Black girls over time). This perspective raises questions for how researchers describe and value the cultures and perspectives of individuals and groups (Banks, 2006).

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