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

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538 Raymond Boudon
specific methodology for survey analysis. The fact is that when systematic ob-
servations are carried out on a given population, what one gets is a complex of
information which amounts to a person-by person characterization of that pop-
ulation by reference to a set of variables. The development or interpretation of
the sampling is then a matter of analysing the relations between these variables.
Usually, the question is how n explicative variables help to explain an (n+ I)‘~
variable. Thus, to take a classical example, we may want to explain the phenom-
enon of suicide, given victims’ marital status, sex, places of residence, job etc.
Generally speaking, the explicative variables make up a complex network, and
the usual methods in statistics like variance analysis, single equation regression
analysis etc., as Stouffer and Lazarsfeld have shown, are inadequate. The situa-
tion is even more complicated, and the need for a mathematical methodology
even more urgent, when complex forms of survey are used, as seems to be in-
creasingly necessary nowadays, forms such as contextual and panel surveys.
Contextual surveys are surveys with samplings at not less than two levels, as
for instance when a sample group of secondary schools is first selected followed
by a sample of the pupils in each. Panel surveys are surveys in which the same
population is polled at least twice. These forms of survey, which appear in-
creasingly indispensable for the needs of sociology, produce massive and com-
plex collections of information, for whose analysis intuitive methods cannot
possibly be adequate. The problems presented by the development of socio-
logical surveys have raised many methodological questions, to which sociologists,
in the last ten years or so, have begun to find satisfactory answers.
For a final example of the growing recourse to a mathematical methodology
to meet the needs created by a new observational technique, we can turn to
social psychology. The technique in question is the famous sociogram, de-
vised by Moreno. It consists, as we know, in representing the individuals in a
group by dots, and the affectionate or inimical relations maintained by each
individual with each of the others by arrows linking the paired dots. At the
beginning, investigators contented themselves with developing the information
contained in the sociograms by intuitive procedures, using extremely empiri-
cal indices of cohesion, influence, isolation, etc. However, it quickly became
apparent firstly that these indices suffered from a number of logical defects, and
secondly that the intuitive methods for the analysis of sociograms were
awkward to handle when the group observed - say, a school class - had more
than about ten members. This led to the development of a battery of techniques
enabling the researcher to analyse in as objective and comprehensive manner as
possible the almost indecipherable complex of information constituted by a
sociogram covering a group of 40 or 50 individuals. These techniques use the
results at once of graph theory and of matrix algebra, as a sociogram can
always be represented by a matrix.
It is to be noted that while the methods just described were indeed devised to
meet the needs created by the progress of the observation techniques, it was the
development of electronic computers which favoured their spread. We have, for
instance, Hotelling’s researches on principal components analysis - a special
variant of factor analysis. They demonstrate that a satisfactory solution to the