Quantitative and qualitative history of history of higher education and sciences

Abstract

Sources of educational statistics and sociological surveys of the 19th and 20th centuries are generally considered by scholars to be helpful in the quantitative history of education and pedagogy. The paper points out that the usability of census databases is suitable for describing academic staff or any small group of freely specialized students in university or secondary school with a high qualitative profit. The prosopographical methods applied to university teachers, which are especially accurate when data linkage is done with bibliographies, describe the change of higher education staff in an excellent qualitative way. The history of an individual life is typical field of qualitative researchers, but the statistical analysis of the moments of the concrete life, and that type of life helps the interpretation.