Data, generative models, and mechanisms: More on the principles of analytical sociology

Abstract

This chapter highlights the idea that analytical sociology is a complex and heterogeneous intellectual movement whose content and boundaries are still under development and debate. It presents a set of principles constituting a particular variant of analytical sociology. These principles are likely to lead analytical sociology toward an empirically oriented, experimentally and computationally based, macro-sociology with clearly explicated and empirically grounded dynamic micro- and network-level foundations. The principles increase the probability that the distinctiveness of analytical sociology within contemporary sociology will be appreciated. They also attempt to build a complex interface between statistics and substantively oriented formal modeling which constitutes the constructive side of analytical sociology's critical stance toward variable-centered sociology. The chapter briefly discusses the concept of mechanism, and then explains the meaning of the “model-based” label. Analytical sociology's generative model-building activity is committed to methodological individualism.

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