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68 P. F. Lazarsfeld
tion of these services interrupted? How high is the crime rate, how generously
do people contribute to public charity?s
4. Formation of variates. After indicators have been selected for each dimension,
they must be recombined, because one cannot operate with all those dimensions
and indicators separately.
For some situations the analyst forms one over-all index. If a professor has
six students and only one fellowship to give, he must make an over-all rating of
the six. At another time he may be more interested in how each of several achieve-
ment dimensions is related to an external variate.
Many indicesfor the goodness of citiesexist in literature, some unidimensional,
some multidimensional and still others only concerned with some specific
dimension. The final merits of such a variate often cannot be decided before
having been used for a long time; all depends upon the value of the propositions
to which it leads and how well they in turn combine into larger systems. Often
one hears that a certain variate does not ‘really’ reflect the intended concepts.
This frequently helps in considering more convincing dimensions or additional
indicators. But no absolute decision is possible.6
Our summary, of course, gives an oversimplified version of the operations
involved and leaves many problems undiscussed. But it is sufficient to highlight
the main points relevant to the present purpose. The following remarks are
pertinent : a) The operations involved apply to individuals as well as to collec-
tives and to inanimate objects; one has to devise classificatory systems into
which a concrete given object may be allocated. b) These classifications are
always intended or latent; combinations of indicators are used to decide where
an object is most likely to belong. c) The relation between the manifest observa-
tions and the intended classification is a probabilistic one,
The creation of variates is the first step in the kind of work I have described
as survey analysis. The variates form the material out of which substantive
findings are built. The importance of this kind of work for general sociology
lies in the fact that it forces an amount of clarity and precision which cannot be
attained otherwise. It looks, so to say, at the social world as consisting of objects
which have specifiable characteristics. Events consist of interrelations between
variates which come about over time. Such a representation is properly called
a variate language. Though somewhat awkward, this term is indispensable to
make the main point of this section.
Variate language
The findings of empirical social research have one strong point in common with
ordinary language. Just as we distinguish words and sentences, we have variates
and the propositions into which they are combined. The ‘propositions’ are
necessarily all cross-tabulations between variates. These cross-tabulations can
become quite complex if many variates are involved. Even if we deal with only
three variates, considerable diversity is provided by the use of contingent cross-
tabulations, as, for example, in the following sentence : in upper-class strata,
men and women are equally likely to vote; in lower strata, men have a higher