عنوان

Crossroads of social science :

(Number (ISBN

0875862705

(Number (ISBN

1280656042

(Number (ISBN

6610656045

(Number (ISBN

9780875862705

(Number (ISBN

9781280656040

(Number (ISBN

9786610656042

Erroneous ISBN

0875860907

Erroneous ISBN

0875860915

Erroneous ISBN

9780875860909

Erroneous ISBN

9780875860916

Number

b792082

Title Proper

Crossroads of social science :

General Material Designation

[Book]

Other Title Information

the ICPSR 25th anniversary volume /

First Statement of Responsibility

Heinz Eulau, editor.

Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.

New York :

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Agathon Press,

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

©1989.

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

1 online resource (ix, 177 pages)

Text of Note

Includes bibliographical references.

Text of Note

If there is much disagreement as to what social science looks like or should look like, it is in part due to what the fact that not all social scientists are social scientists. There are those who, in their attempts to define social science, take recourse to philosophies of science, but philosophies of science, it seems to me, are the business of philosophers and not of scientists. Much as the method of "thick description" differs from the methods of quantitative analysis pursued by the contributors to this volume, there is much wisdom in the reminder of the thick-descriptionist anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) that "if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do." The contributors to this volume are all well-known practitioners reflecting in one way or another on what they as individuals or as members of a social science discipline are doing. There is no lack of apologetic, critical, or programmatic statements in their diagnoses, but they come to these statements as practitioners and not as philosophers. All of them speak from experience in doing theory-driven empirical research, not from the lofty perch of some comprehensive vision that, more likely than not, is built on feet of clay and likely to crumble when the next vision comes along. Yet, there is much heterogeneity in these essays. Reviewers of volumes such as this collection almost invariably complain that the symposium resembles more a potpourri than a symphony, or that the editor has failed to integrate the various contributions into some overarching framework. Yet as this book argues, there are many crossroads where social scientists meet, move, halt, or collide, and the contributors to this symposium, while having more in common than not, also differ in their particular interests or concerns. It cannot be otherwise. The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research is the country and perhaps the world leading center for archiving quantitative data and for utilizing these data through instruction in relevant theories and methods, thus contributing to the development of the social sciences and to studies of their relation to broader trends in the various disciplines. This is their 25th anniversary volume.

Text of Note

Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002.

Title

Crossroads of social science.

International Standard Book Number

0875860915

Social sciences-- Research, Congresses.

Sciences sociales-- Recherche, Congrès.

SOCIAL SCIENCE-- Methodology.

SOCIAL SCIENCE-- Research.

Social Sciences - General.

Social sciences-- Research.

Social Sciences.

Sociale wetenschappen.

SOC-- 019000

SOC-- 024000

Number

Edition

Class number

Book number

Class number

System Code

Eulau, Heinz,1915-2004.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Date of Transaction

20201207051829.0

Cataloguing Rules (Descriptive Conventions))

pn

Electronic name

[Book]

Y