Quantitative Sociology

Book excerpt: Quantitative Sociology: International Perspective on Mathematical and Statistical Modeling presents diverse mathematical modeling procedures involving different strategies for understanding sociology. This book is organized into three parts encompassing 22 chapters that also describe meta-mathematical models suggesting general ways of conceptualizing or expressing phenomena in mathematical or logical languages. Part I deals with the diachronic process analysis, causation of conditional probabilities, and graph-theoretical formulations. Part II highlights the different fields of applied statistics, including experimental designs, survey sampling and panel designs, multivariate analysis, econometrics, multiple classification analysis, and other approaches to data analysis and measurement. This part also treats the elimination of distortions or artifacts of various kinds, such as sampling errors or biases stemming from faulty designs, measurement errors, or incorrectly specified equations. Part III explores other mathematical models for a deductive or semideductive system containing axioms, definitions, and theorems that may then be examined both in terms of internal consistency using mathematical reasoning and their ability to explain real-world phenomena. This book is of value to sociologists, applied and statistical mathematicians, and researchers.