Evidence and proof

I agree on what Jingjing said about people view quantitative research more scientific. But I cannot agree with you on " social research is not like science that can always be proved by all numerical evidence"Durkheim's research on suicide is scientific, and it is not explained in numbers, My interpretation for this is because it is hard for people to operationalization a concept, it required a lot of thinking. Durkheim operationalized suicided by dividing the population into different social groups, also used previous research data, so it is scientific.

I would agree with you Keijing that it is the struggle of operationalizing terms in sociology that creates problems because one of the key points of controversy in sociological studies is that most of the concepts we try to define are very abstract and can be defined differently by different researchers. So reliability of research can be difficult when there are potentially different definitions of a single concept. But it does not mean that there is no way to create numerical data as sociology has moved forward in how it argues certain theories through empirical data but always does note that there is always the potential for outliers.