Correct but besides the point. The question of the study is "how much and how do you quantify this?". There are lots of blindingly obvious qualitative stateme

Correct but besides the point. The question of the study is "how much and how do you quantify this?". There are lots of blindingly obvious qualitative statements, where the quantitative parts is far from obvious. That makes them a good starting point for research. This is like writing about Newton's theory of gravity as "scientist finds out apples fall downwards. Wasn't that already obvious?".