Qualitative v.s. Quantitative research methods in development studies

Qualitative methods are said to be able to better deal with processes, contexts, or people's lived-experiences.
On the other hand, quantitative methods can well present us social structures, which are otherwise not recognisable in our daily lives, by dealing with larger number of sample.
Since quantitative methods have been well developed and codifed, they can increase objectivetiy of research resluts compared to qualitative methods.
Historically, quantitative methods have been more popular than qualitative methods in research of social sciences, and so were in development studies.
This is because of strong influence from research methods of natural sciences.
People tended to believe in science and its objectivity or value neutrality.
In the post-WWII period, in development studies, quantitative methods were rather uncritically adopted, and eventually this has come to pose problems due to the outcomes of development interventions as well as interventions themselves.
Development studies are inevitably entailed by subsequent concrete interventions, the impact of the research outcomes that affects targeted people are significant. So, heated vigorous debates have been made over appropriate research methods for development studies.
While there seems to be no one-best research method, it is important to acknowledge that quantative and qualitative methods have different underlying theoretical backgrounds.
As has already been mentioned, views of quantitative researchers are generally underlain by positivist epistemology. On the other hand, qualitative researchers' views are occupied with interpretivism or critical realism epistemologies.
Research of social sciences are to find out social reality and to construct knowledge about it. In this research, we need to convert what we have captured through investigation into language. Both reality and knowledge intended to be constructed will have to be expressed in the form of language.
Language is just one of the symbolic systems that we use.
Since itlanguages have limitations in communicating reality, it is critical to clarify the contexts in which those languages are used.
As the same logic applieds to social research, it is critical for researchers to clarify their respective ontologies and epistemologies, which will affect all parts of research components, such as strategy, research questions, design, methods and analyses of data, thus, validity of the research.
Since quantitative methods tend to strip data from their contexts, thus, disconnect data from reality.