Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

66 P. F. Lazarsfeld
we mean work which is close to policy formation and practical decision. This
leaves the second type of thinking without label, although it covers much of the
work which the general public considers as characteristically sociological, e.g.,
the role conflict of the working mother, the anomie of the city dweller, the in-
fluence of reference groups on people’s opinions.
The term sociography has fallen out of use because it came to connote a
mechanical description instead of a systematic analysis of concrete data which
it originally meant. In an early draft of this chapter I suggested the term empiri-
cal social research, but the objection was made that the macrosociologist is
obviously dealing with empirical material. Finally I settled for ‘survey analysis’,
as it deals with a large number of units described uniformly by a number of
characteristics. It is merely necessary to keep in mind that the units of a survey
may be organizations or countries as well as people.
Actually still another term would be most appropriate. A survey interrelates
the various characteristics of its units, and often prior to such statistical work,
the analyst must create the characteristic relevant for his purpose. A brief
reminder of how he proceeds is necessary and this requires a second termino-
logical convention. Some characteristics are ‘natural), e.g., men and women,
languages which do and those which do not use a certain sound; thus we speak of
dichotomies. For others, easy quantification is provided, e.g., age of people or
proportion of voters in a series of countries; the term variable is then customary.
But there are also rank orders given, e.g., at the French agrigation, or carefully
constructed scales and lists used in certain Anglo-Saxon school systems. A
common term for all these classificatory devices is needed and variate is becom-
ing more generally accepted. Be it remembered that such variates may be of
different types, far more than those just mentioned, and they may characterize
collectives as well as individuals, and refer to different time periods; they may
deal with behaviour as well as reports of ‘inner’ experiences, and so on. When-
ever we classify a number of units we shall talk of measurement. This is a
rather broad use of the term, but it leads to no difficulty; if we classify a set of
units by a quantitative variate (variable) we have the special case of conventional
measurement.
The flow from concepts to variates
One of the main tasks of empirical social research is to translate conceptual
ideas into variates. Sometimes one is directly interested in particular variates
by virtue of the problem at hand. Thus, if one studies income distribution, the
local currency is an obvious variate. The matter becomes more complex if one
is concerned with ‘standard of living’. The literature on the various standard of
living indices will testify to the difficulties inherent in the translation of such
notion into a variate. The statement that white-collar and blue-collar workers
with the same income have different standards of living cannot be made without
carefully considering combinations from a variety of more elementary data.
The same situation exists when the physical anthropologist talks of body types
or the sociologist talks of cohesive or integrated collectives. The flow from
concepts to variates generally prodeeds in four steps.