1 - Introduction and Overview

Summary

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

The seven parts of this book cover different examples of quantitative reasoning in social science applications, along with interspersed discussions on the role of quantitative theories and methods in understanding the social world. We are trying to show how researchers in different social sciences think about and use quantitative ideas. These approaches vary across the different disciplines, and we think that the best way for a student to get a broad overview is to see how quantitative ideas are applied in a variety of settings.

Hence, we focus on applications, including combat in the First World War, demographics in nineteenth-century Mexico, forecasts of economic conditions by the Federal Reserve, racial disturbances in the 1960s, voting in congressional committees, Pavlovian conditioning, and the effect of migration on solidarity. Each part of the book has several examples, with discussion of the theories used to explain each phenomenon under study, along with the data and models used to describe what is happening. We thus hope to give a general perspective of how these models and methods are used in the social sciences. It is not the usual straightforward story of the form, “Here are some data, here's the model, and look how well the method works.” Rather, we explore the strengths but also the limitations of the models and methods in the context of the real problems being studied.