Behavioral and Social Science 50 Years of Discovery (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Measuring Social Change
Measuring Social Change
Pages 36-72
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From page 36... ...
Ogburn concluded that public policies and interventions meant to guide modern social change would depend heavily upon the development of a unified national statistical system to collect and process information about social trends (Ogburn, 1929:9581. Although Ogburn's vision of a unified statistical system has not been realized, he may well have regarded this as but a lag in adjustment to which all inventions give rise.
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From page 37... ...
, his theory and his own work gave priority to mechanical inventions (1922b:76-77; Ogburn & Nimkoff, 1940:809-8101.~ This benign neglect of social inventions is coupled with Ogburn's firm conviction that the behavioral and social sciences can shorten cultural lags. Nowhere did he summarize this belief better than in his chapter on invention in Recent Social Trends (President's Research Committee on Social Trends, 1933:166~: Society will hardly decide to discourage science and invention, for these have added knowledge and have brought material welfare.
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From page 38... ...
are singled out here: human testing and sample surveys. Human Testing Ogburn (1950)
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From page 39... ...
Derivative effects of behavioral and social inventions include the spur they often provide to mechanical inventions. The first high-speed printer (essential for modern computers)
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From page 40... ...
, attitudes, and opinions, awareness of its limitations led to statistical inventions for discerning latent structures (Guttman, 1950; Lazarsfeld, l9SO, 1954, 1967; Rasch, 1968, 1980) and statistical interactions (Goodman, 1970~.2 These analytical innovations have shaped theory and hypothesis testing in behavioral and social sciences and, 2The history of social science inventions should become an important part of any sociology of knowledge as well as being integral to the study of social change.
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From page 41... ...
Major short-term policy indicators on unemployment and the cost of living are based wholly or in part upon sample surveys. The Survey Division of the Bureau of the Census has become one of its largest, quite apart from many other divisions within the bureau also operating sample surveys or collecting information through them.
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From page 42... ...
Sample surveys are also important in applied social science research, especially by nonacademic organizations. Not only has evaluation research become a substantial private industry, but major organizations such as the Armed Forces have developed a considerable in-house capability for sample surveys; it has been said that the most surveyed population in the world is the Armed Forces of the United States; certainly the American soldier in World War II served the most surveyed military in history (Stouffer et al., 1950)
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From page 43... ...
That view scanted the great social inventions of earlier societies, such as bureaucratic administration and empires (Eisenstadt, 1963) and antedated most of modern behavioral and social science.3 The role of economics in setting government policies and in the social control of economies has grown considerably since the work in Recent Social Trends.
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From page 44... ...
Ogburn believed Mat Me failure of ~nshtudons to adapt to advanc~ng technology produced nearly all social maladjustment and disorgaru sOgburn (1957b:8-9) concluded that the study of social trends carries two major messages: "The first general message that knowledge of social trends brings to us is that there is much stability in society, even though there be a period of great and rapid social change....
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From page 45... ...
Below I will illustrate two different ways in which social science- both basic and applied-can function in restructuring societies in consequence of changes in culture. Statistics and Quality Control The invention and diffusion of statistical quality control illustrates how social inventions can cope with the cultural dislocations caused by material and nonmaterial inventions.
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From page 46... ...
Since 1951, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers has recognized his importance to Japanese industry by creating a major award, the Deming Prize, for contributions to statistical quality control in industry (American Statistical Association, 1983:11.~° Some believe that the competitive margin of Japanese over U.S. products is attributable to a higher integration of statistical quality control in Japanese industry.
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From page 47... ...
points out, differs from a longitudinal or panel analysis in that the latter examine changes in the individual members of a population or sample over time, while cohort analysis examines the changing characteristics of an aggregate through time: it is macro- rather than microlongitudinal. The value of a cohort analysis to our understanding of social change can be illustrated by the studies of changing attitudes toward racial integration in the United States (Taylor et al., 1978:481.
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From page 48... ...
REISS, JR. Cohort analysis has become one of the more powerful instruments of social planning, especially when linked to social and demographic forecasting.
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draws attention to the fact that many of our basic concepts and procedures of social measurement such as voting, counting people, money, social rank, rewards and punishments, randomization, and sampling did not originate in the pursuit of scientific knowledge but rather as the consequence of practical problem solving. Not only do we depend upon social processes to invent many of our concepts and measures, but the development and maintenance of a social science depend in the long run, as Duncan notes, upon "what the society wants or allows to be measured and is able and willing to pay for.
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From page 50... ...
RElSS, JR. Because behavioral and social concepts and measures originate in social processes and require support if they are to be maintained, a national statistical system to measure and monitor social changes can survive only if it is folly institutionalized.
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From page 51... ...
Many small inventions, for example, went into what we think of as the modern sample survey: not only inventions such as statistical probability, sampling, and analytical techniques, but organizational procedures to train and supervise people in acquiring information in interviews and to link these people together in a sequential process. These observations have a number of implications for the study of social change.
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From page 52... ...
The predilection is not easily explained, though some social processes impede direct measurement (Reiss, 1968, 1971, 1976)
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From page 53... ...
Consequences of Institutionalizing Measures of Changes The difficulties social scientists encounter in measuring social change may preclude the kind of precision we commonly associate with the physical sciences. The past may never be kept in such a way that we can tie it to the future, once we discover or invent new ways of measuring change.
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From page 54... ...
Other sex-linked census concepts include "secondary family workers" and "housewife in the labor force." Yet other seemingly simple census concepts vulnerable to secular change include "ethnic status" (vulnerable to changing patterns of marnage) , "native language," "county of ongin," and "ethnic status of parents." Examples of increments to a class occur quite commonly for legislated concepts.
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From page 55... ...
But all of these estimates were based on a presumption that unemployment was a temporary dislocation. Consequently, there was surprisingly little statistical information on unemployment in the chapter on labor in Recent Social Trends (President's Research Committee on Social Trends, 1933:xvi)
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Under work force concepts, an increase in the gainfully occupied necessarily meant a decrease in the unemployed. Under the labor force concept, the unemployed are measured somewhat separately from the employed.
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Yet there is all too seldom provision for adjusting statistical series to secular changes. Some Consequences of the Organization of Statistical Indicators No society could afford the effort to acquire and organize all of the statistical information that might usefully enter into decisionmaking.
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Volunteer sample surveys, rotating panels, and synthetic estimates are some of the ways of doing so. This is an area for social invention.
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From page 59... ...
But the conha~y emphasis upon individual actors and individual welfare still dominates much contemporary theory and research, biasing He Reagent of social change. Earlier I used unemployment as an example of a major social indicator.
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From page 60... ...
The sample survey is built primarily around sampling individuals and is poorly developed to secure information about organizations. Indeed, most methods for collecting information on organizations actually collect information about individuals in organizations or rely on individual surrogates for the organization.
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From page 61... ...
Although he used patents to count the growth of invention, he recognized the limitations of this indicator. It perhaps is unfortunate that he did so little to try to count social inventions.
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From page 62... ...
Individual versus Collective Welfare There is a bias in welfare models of human behavior toward optimizing or maximizing individual welfare rather than the welfare of collectivities such as organizations.20 Trade-offs commonly are seen in terms of individual rather than collective costs and benefits. The quality of life is measured in terms of individual rather than collective units: Is this community a good one for scientists rather than for science?
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From page 63... ...
Lags in Measuring Social Change Ogburn edited an annual series of the May issue of The American Journal of Sociology called Social Changes in [Year] from 1928 to 1935 and in May 1934, one entitled "Social Change and the New Deal." In the early volumes, Ogburn made clear that his purpose was not that of editing a conventional yearbook but rather "scientific analyses of social change .
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From page 64... ...
How to resolve these problems is not altogether clear. A good theory helps, but data collection also depends upon social processes.
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From page 65... ...
Need for a National Statistical System Although one can easily demonstrate that our national indicators of economic and social change are more highly developed in some areas than was true on publication of Recent Social Trends, in many areas there has been little improvement. For example, we still have few national indicators of legal change, and we rely almost exclusively on ad hoc surveys to monitor changes in values and value practices such as religious belief and observance.
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From page 66... ...
A SUMMING UP The decades since the publication of Recent Social Trends have been a period largely of benign neglect by the behavioral and social sciences in modeling and measuring social change, economics being the major exception. This neglect may owe in part to the reticence of theorists, save for economists, to address matters of social change.
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From page 67... ...
1979 Some problems of concept and measurement. In National Commission on Employment and Unemployment Statistics, Counting the Labor Force: Readings in Labor Force Statistics, Appendix Vol.
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From page 68... ...
International Statistical Review 45:129-157. Ericksen, E
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From page 69... ...
National Commission on Employment and Unemployment Statistics 1979 Counting the Labor Force. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
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From page 70... ...
New York: Houghton Mifflin. President's Research Committee on Social Trends 1933 Recent Social Trends in the United States.
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From page 71... ...
B 1968 Cohort analysis.
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