Quantitative methods: past and present

Abstract

In celebrating the 40th anniversary of Administrative Science Quarterly, Weick (1996) related the story of several firefighters who did not survive in a 1994 South Canyon fire because they had failed to drop the heavy tools they were carrying while trying to escape from the fire. In this second report, I will argue that the heavy tools assembled during the zenith of quantitative methods (QM) practice in the 1960s have largely been retooled. Such retooling reflects the field’s innovative adaptation and thereby modernization in human geography to the mutation and diversity in both methodological and substantive geographic problems. More specifically, the question of what constitutes the appropriate strategy for studying geographic phenomena has evolved from assigning quantitative methods an ontological position to analytical narratives that are more sensitive to writing geography from above and from below. Past practitioners of QM in human geography largely subscribed to the principle of methodological individualism, that is, the assumption that social or group outcomes may be explained by the behavior or action of individuals (Brodbeck, 1968). Investigation of social entities or group phenomena in space tended to be ontologically economical (e.g., the use of terms like ‘migrant’ or ‘market’) and these groups were often but not always analyzed through some form of statistical aggregates. The popular use of group entities is based on the difficulties of conducting geographic explanations based on individual sovereignty. However, the present construction of geographic knowledge by QM practitioners has become more sensitive to the constitutive parts, that is, individuals and their properties or attributes, than the social or geographic wholes themselves. Secondly, it is commonly perceived that the QM community in human geography is legislated by methodology and the model of reduction. Such a standpoint neglects the fact that the practice of human geographic research has increasingly required that the community be given the autonomy to pursue

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