Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T02:20:15.644Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Quetelet and His Critics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2021

John H. Goldthorpe
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Quetelet sought to take further the application of probability theory to quantitative social data. Using the Gaussian error curve – or normal distribution -- he undertook analyses, based on the concept of average types of men and women, that went beyond regularities in simply ‘events’, such as deaths, to those that he believed were demonstrable in ‘volitional phenomena’ such as suicide, crime and marriage. These he recognised as examples of the basic explananda of sociological science. He grappled with problems of the identification of the causal factors underlying such regularities and of the creation of variables that adequately reflected population heterogeneity. Although achieving no great success in these respects, being in various ways too far ahead of his times, he did highlight problems of a fundamental kind and signposted the directions in which advances had to be made. The reception of his work in France, Germany and Britain pointed to a range of major issues that lay ahead.

Type
Chapter
Information
Pioneers of Sociological Science
Statistical Foundations and the Theory of Action
, pp. 25 - 41
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×