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74 P. F. Lazarsfeld
dents, about 40 per cent of the professors report personal apprehension, but
only half of these impute intimidation to their colleagues. When colleges are not
locally under attack, not much discussion of the general issue is likely to occur.
The faculty read about incidents elsewhere and are aware of the generally un-
pleasant atmosphere, but believe their colleagues insensitive to the professional
values involved. As the two rows approach the turbulent colleges the pair of
figures in each column indicates that imputed intimidation occurs as frequently
as experienced apprehension. The former is even slightly more frequent than the
latter in the most turbulent colleges where much talk about threats to academic
freedom occurs, and each professor feels that he is calm relative to the ‘hysteria’
which surrounds him.
The essence of this example is that it is based simultaneously on a sample of
organizations and, within them, a sample of individuals. Tt‘has become customary
to talk of contextual propositions when collective and individual characteristics
are studied conjointly. In recent years, the number of publications reporting
such contextual propositions has multiplied rapidly. Scales have been devised
to measure the inferiority feelings of young people, and their scores on the
scales have been related to their religion. The religious composition of the
neighbourhood in which the respondent lived was also ascertained; in this way
it was possible to say whether the young people lived in a consonant environ-
ment, where persons of their own religious faith were dominant, or in a disso-
nant one, where their families belonged to a religious minority. It was consistent-
ly found that for every religious group, living in a social context of predominantly
shared religious affiliation had a reassuring effect on the individual’s self-esteem.
In another study, the problem was to discover factors affecting the award of
compensation by jurors in accident cases. The wealth of each juror was ascer-
tained (an individual variate), as well as the average wealth of the county in
which the case was tried (a variate pertaining to a collective, the county). The
wealthier the county, the larger were the compensations awarded in the cases.
However, within counties, wealthier jurors made smaller awards, presumably
because they were biased in favour of the insurance companies whose values
represented the preservation of wealth. This interpretation points up the inter-
play between social norms and individual frames of reference.
In sum, then, survey techniques and sociological concern with larger collec-
tives are not contradictory. There is nothing in the development of measure-
ment techniques or the logic of quantitative analysis which interferes with a
fruitful coexistence of the two. Their convergence is only limited by practical
considerations. When interest focuses on a very large unit or on very complex
problems, different methods may have to be used. (These methods, usually
subsumed under the label of ‘macrosociology’, have received increasing atten-
tion in recent years; our next section is devoted to them.)
Typologies
Much writing of sociologists includes the use of typologies. Personalities,
social systems, organizations occur in so many variations that some way of
ordering them is an indispensable preliminary for further analysis. By some