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"Lieberson's arguments cut to the heart of what sociology is and should be, calling for a different approach to the study of social phenomena. . . . An important, stimulating, and provocative book that should be required reading in sociological methods and theory courses."
--Burton Singer and Margaret Mooney Marini, Sociological Methodology
"[Lieberson] insists that explanations of social phenomena have to be grounded in a detailed knowledge of what is actually going on, and that such knowledge cannot come from increasingly sophisticated manipulation of fundamentally trivial data. . . . What is most compelling and cheering about Lieberson's book is his own catholicity and openness."
--Howard Becker, Society
"Making It Count . . . should have the positive result of forcing quantitative sociology back to fundamentals."
--Richard A. Berk, American Journal of Sociology
"This book represents the most serious and extensive critical assessment from within the empiricist tradition. It comes from a[n] . . . eminent scholar, theorist and practitioner of social research, who takes the trouble to illustrate his methodological points by the use of enuine and important examples, instead of the more usual artificial contrived ones."
--Tony Coxon, Times Higher Education Supplement
List of contents
Preface
PART ONE: CURRENT PRACTICES
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Selectivity
Chapter 3: Comparisons, Counterfactual
Conditionals, and Contamination
Chapter 4: Asymmetrical Forms of Causation
Chapter 5: Variation, Level of Analysis, and
the Research Question
Chapter 6: Control Variables
Chapter 7: More about Current Practices
PAHT TWO: TOWARD A SOLUTION
Chapter 8: And Now What?
Chapter 9: Rethinking Causality
Chapter 10: From Controls to Outcomes
Chapter 11: Further Suggestions
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Stanley Lieberson is Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he was a past president of the American Sociological Association. He is the author of MAKING IT COUNT: The Improvement of Social Research and Theory and PIECE OF THE PIE: Black and White Immigrants Since 1880.
Summary
Reexamines the model of empirical research underlying most empirical work. This book features questions that are basically unanswerable even if the investigator had ideal nonexperimental data?
