This paper offers reasons for using traditional quantitative research methods and illustrates some of the considerations demanding rigor in a study on gender discrimination in school-administrator salaries. Traditional quantitative methods provide a meaningful language based on numbers and objectivity, and they are less time-consuming and complex than qualitative methods. A study that investigated predictors of administrators' salaries--those of 488 associate and assistant professors and 135 assistant professors--is described. Decisions made during the research-design, data-collection, and data-analysis stages--selecting the study framework, identifying relevant variables, and deciding to use an incremental cluster regression method--are described. The study concluded that gender had a significant effect on salaries, even after consideration of all other predictors. A conclusion is that the key in making decisions about research (the design, data collection, and data analysis) is to understand what is gained or sacrificed in the rigor of the study. Besides internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity, an additional hallmark of rigor is congruency among the study's conceptual framework, the identified problem, research questions, and methodology. (LMI)