Karl Popper's most commonly cited contribution to philosophy and the philosophy of science is his theory of falsifiability (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge). (Stephen Thornton has a very nice essay on Popper's philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) In its essence, this theory is an alternative …
Public opinion–an example
This posting is a thought experiment that is an effort to probe the underlying components of "public opinion." I've created 8 sample data sets that I have normalized to a 1-5 scale; I've interpreted the scores as a Likert scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree); I've assumed that each data set represents a distinct …
What do Americans think?
Public opinion research raises many difficult questions. (See an earlier post on this topic.) We would like to know what Americans are thinking about current circumstances and issues; we'd like to know how those attitudes differ across social groups; and we'd like to have a basis for attempting to explain changes in attitudes over time. …
MacIntyre and Taylor on the human sciences
There is a conception of social explanation that provides a common starting point for quite a few theories and approaches in a range of the social sciences. I'll call it the "rational, material, structural" paradigm. It looks at the task of social science as the discovery of explanations of social outcomes; and it brings an …
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A crisis in sociology?
Alvin Gouldner thought there was a "coming crisis in sociology" -- but that was almost forty years ago, in 1970 (The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology). And in 1996 Immanuel Wallerstein closed out the century by chairing the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, issuing a report that called for some radical …
Polling and social knowledge
Here's a pretty interesting graphic from Pollster.com: As you can see, the graph summarizes a large number of individual polls measuring support for the two major party candidates from January 1 to October 26. The site indicates that it includes all publicly available polls during the time period. Each poll result is represented with two …
What do polls tell us?
We're all interested in the opinions of vast numbers of strangers -- potential voters, investors, consumers, college students, or home owners. Our interest is often a practical one -- we would like to know how the election is likely to go, whether the stock market will rebound, whether an influenza season will develop into a …
Mapping social data
Fig. 1. Household income inequality (US Census 2000 link) Fig. 2. Poverty rates (US Census Data 2000 link) Fig. 4. 90 day mortgage delinquency -- Q1 2008 (Federal Reserve Bank link) It's interesting to look at each of these data maps in detail. The comparisons of patterns are very revealing. Figure 4 is the most …
Discipline, method, hegemony in sociology
An earlier post referred to the "Perestroika" debate within political science. There are similar foundational debates within other social science disciplines, including especially sociology. What is particularly striking is not that there are deep disagreements about the methodology and epistemology of sociology -- this has often been true within sociology, going back to the methodenstreiten …
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Quasi-experimental data?
Stan Lieberson is one of a group of sociologists for whom I have great respect when it comes to intelligent thinking about social science methodology. His 1985 book, Making It Count: The Improvement of Social Research and Theory, is a good example of some of this thinking about the foundations of social science knowledge, and …
Understanding Society 