Social Science Concepts: A User's Guide - Softcover

Goertz, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691124116 ISBN 13: 9780691124117

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Concepts lie at the core of social science theory and methodology. They provide substance to theories; they form the basis of measurement; they influence the selection of cases. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide explores alternative means of concept construction and their impact on the role of concepts in measurement, case selection, and theories.


While there exists a plethora of books on measurement, scaling, and the like, there are virtually no books devoted to the construction and analysis of concepts and their role in the research enterprise. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide provides detailed and practical advice on the construction and use of social science concepts; a Web site provides classroom exercises.


It uses a wide range of examples from political science and sociology such as revolution, welfare state, international disputes and war, and democracy to illustrate the theoretical and practical issues of concept construction and use. It explores the means of constructing complex, multilevel, and multidimensional concepts. In particular, it examines the classic necessary and sufficient condition approach to concept building and contrasts it with the family resemblance approach. The consequences of valid concept construction are explored in both qualitative and quantitative analyses.



Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide will prove an indispensable guide for graduate students and scholars in the social sciences. More broadly, it will appeal to scholars in any field who wish to think more carefully about the concepts used to create theories and research designs.




For Course Use:




Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide has been written with classroom use in mind. Many of the chapters have been successfully taught at the Annual Training Institute on Qualitative Research Methods which is sponsored by the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods. Feedback from those experiences has been incorporated into the text. Each chapter provides useful, practical, and detailed advice on how to construct, evaluate, and use concepts. To make the volume more useful, an extensive set of classroom exercises is available from the author's Web page at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ggoertz/social_science_concepts.html. These include questions about prominent published work on concepts, measures, and case selection; in addition there are logic exercises and questions regarding large-N applications.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gary Goertz is Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Contexts of International Politics and International Norms and Decision Making: A Punctuated Equilibrium Model, and the coauthor of War and Peace in International Rivalry.

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"Gary Goertz is at the forefront of a number of important methodological debates. He is one of the very few scholars who regularly crosses the boundary between quants and quals, and this book reflects his strength in both areas."--John Gerring, Boston University

"Goertz reaffirms with great success a foundational idea established more than three decades ago by Giovanni Sartori: concept analysis is an indispensable component of social science methodology, and we neglect it at our peril."--David Collier, University of California, Berkeley

"One of the greatest challenges facing the social sciences today is the task of cultivating a closer connection between theoretical concepts and empirical analysis. In this book, Gary Goertz lays the foundation for a new approach to social scientific concepts and demonstrates the many benefits that follow from the thoughtful articulation of concepts in social research."--Charles Ragin, University of Arizona at Tucson, author of Fuzzy-Set Social Science

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Social Science Concepts

A User's GuideBy Gary Goertz

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12411-7

Contents

List of Tables............................................................................................viiList of Figures...........................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................................................xiChapter One Introduction.................................................................................1PART ONE THEORETICAL, STRUCTURAL, AND EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTS.....................................25Chapter Two Structuring and Theorizing Concepts..........................................................27Chapter Three Concept Intension and Extension............................................................69Chapter Four Increasing Concept-Measure Consistency......................................................95Chapter Five Substitutability and Weakest-Link Measures with William F. Dixon............................129PART TWO CONCEPTS AND CASE SELECTION.....................................................................157Chapter Six Concepts and Selecting (on) the Dependent Variable with J. Joseph Hewitt.....................159Chapter Seven Negative Case Selection: The Possibility Principle with James Mahoney......................177Chapter Eight Concepts and Choosing Populations with J. Joseph Hewitt....................................211PART THREE CONCEPTS IN THEORIES..........................................................................235Chapter Nine Concepts in Theories: Two-Level Theories with James Mahoney.................................237References................................................................................................269Exercises and Web Site....................................................................................289Index.....................................................................................................291

Chapter One

Introduction

To define a thing, is to select from among the whole of its properties those which shall be understood to be designated and declared by its name; the properties must be very well known to us before we can be competent to determine which of them are fittest to be chosen for this purpose.

Every proposition consists of two names [concepts]: and every proposition affirms or denies one of these names, of the other.... Here, therefore, we find a new reason why the signification of names, and the relation generally, between names and the things signified by them, must occupy the preliminary stage of the inquiry we are engaged in. J. S. Mill

John Stuart Mill began his System of Logic with a "book" devoted to concepts. Starting with concepts was a logical choice since they are some of the main building blocks for constructing theoretical propositions. Propositional logic involves the proper manipulation of symbols. For this to have usefulness in science these symbols need to be given substantive content. In this book I show how one can construct substantive concepts and discuss the implications for empirical (qualitative and quantitative) research of different concept structures.

In spite of the primordial importance of concepts, they have received relatively little attention over the years by social scientists. Giovanni Sartori and David Collier stand out as the dominating figures in the work on concepts. Yet the contrast with the massive literature on quantitative measures, indicators, scales, and the like cannot be more extreme. Hence we have a paradox: as Mill noted, concepts are a central part of our theories, yet researchers, apart from Sartori and Collier, have focused very little attention on social science concepts per se (though see Ragin 2000).

This paradox has arisen in part from the deep differences between quantitative and qualitative scholars. As a matter of the sociology of social science (at least in political science and sociology), qualitative scholars have been most concerned with concepts—which are generally seen as nonmathematical and deal with substantive issues—while quantitative researchers have focused on scaling, indicators, reliability, and other issues dealing with producing good quantitative measures.

In this book I straddle this gap (or chasm if you prefer) between the qualitative scholars' concern for substantively valid concepts and the quantitative scholars' interest in good numerical measures. As the title of this volume indicates, it will not be a balanced treatment: it will focus on concepts. However, I develop the methodological and mathematical implications of concepts for the design and building of quantitative measures. As Lazarsfeld and Barton said decades ago:

[B]efore we can investigate the presence or absence of some attribute ... or before we can rank objects or measure them in terms of some variable, we must form the concept of that variable. (1951, 155, my emphasis)

While we all pay lip service to the mantra that theory should guide methodology, it is often the case that the cart is leading the horse. Symptomatic of this is the Jaggers and Gurr discussion of the polity concept of democracy (1995). Their analysis of the concept of democracy is in fact located in the section entitled "Operationalizing Democracy": clearly the focus is on the quantitative measure, not on the concept. In contrast, I shall spend a lot of time on the various conceptualizations of democracy, and only afterward will I analyze the downstream consequences for quantitative measures.

Given the division between quantitative and qualitative scholars it is hard for anyone to keep her attention focused on both at the same time. Goertz's Second Law says:

The amount of attention devoted to a concept is inversely related to the attention devoted to the quantitative measure.

The contrast between Collier and Bollen on democracy illustrates this law in action. Collier and Mahon (1993) provide an insightful analysis of the concept(s) of democracy, but give little guidance on how one might put these ideas into quantitative action. Bollen has made major contributions to the literature on the quantitative measures of democracy, but his discussions of the concept of democracy rarely exceed a few sentences.

This book thus tries to violate Goertz's Second Law. I analyze in detail the major ways one can build concepts, but I do not stop there. I continue the analysis by examining how different concept structures have important methodological implications for the construction of quantitative measures. For example, as chapter 4 on democracy shows, to be faithful to one's concepts implies measures quite different from those that one finds in the quantitative literature on democracy indicators, scales, etc.

The publication of the book by King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) relaunched the debate about the distinctiveness, or lack thereof, of qualitative methods. The formation in 2003 of the Qualitative Methods section of the American Political Science Association was one response to the King et al. challenge. This new section has created three awards, one of which is the Giovanni Sartori Book Award. Going back to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691124116
• ISBN 13: 9780691124117
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar