American Sociological Review 1964
Devolution of an Empirical Generalization
Abstract
W E have in our profession no institutionalized procedure for subjecting the contents of our scholarly journals to critical comment. To be sure, manuscripts submitted to the journals are reviewed by professional colleagues; and perhaps publication carries with it some seal of professional approval. The reviewer, however, seldom has a work-day to devote to a single manuscript. He is not inclined to check each source cited, to locate the basic data and recalculate critical computations, or to survey the relevant literature in order to evaluate independently assertions of fact. Circumstances combine to force an evaluation of a self-contained document. Now couple with this the strong pressures in sociology to go beyond the facts, which are likely to be dull even if true, in quest for broad implications to tie to the broad implications conjured up by other sociologists. If we legitimate a report at the outset by establishing a bond with our predecessors and conclude with a provocative statement about the changing structure of American society, the substance of the paper seems to take on new meaning. Perhaps it should; but all too often an assumption, an unfounded assertion, or out-and-out speculation has been transmitted as the substance. Upon reading Population Decline and the Social and Demographic Structure of an American City in a recent issue of the Review,' I could not, initially, relate the substance of the report to the guiding hypothesis, and when I looked more closely at the data presented, I could not formulate a model of change in residential characteristics that would lead me to investigate these associations. Finally, I turned to the references cited in note 1 of the article wherein, I thought, might lie the tip-off.2 For convenience, I shall refer to the sequence of articles cited as the reports of 1950, 1958, 1959, and 1964, respectively. They offer an instructive case study in the transmission of substantive findings.
- DOI
- 10.2307/2090868
- Sources
- openalex