Is QE Just ENA?

In the emerging field of quantitative ethnography (QE), epistemic network analysis (ENA) has featured prominently, to the point where multiple scholars in the QE community have asked some variation on the question: Is QE just ENA? This paper is an attempt to address this question systematically. We review arguments that QE should be considered a background and justification for using ENA as well as arguments that ENA should be considered merely one approach to implementing QE ideas. We conclude that ENA is used in QE, but not exclusively; and that QE uses ENA, but not exclusively; but that the answer to this question is less important than the reflexive thinking about methodology that has been a key focus of the QE community. Our hope is that, rather than a definitive answer to this question, this paper provides some ways to think about the relationships between theory, methods, and analytic techniques as the QE community continues to grow.