Reflections on Local Population Studies and Social Science History

2018 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Osamu Saito
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Population Studies ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Local Source ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Source Materials

This personal reflection of more than 40 years' work on the supply of labour in a household context discusses the relationship between social science history (the application to historical phenomena of the tools developed by social scientists) and local population studies. The paper concludes that historians working on local source materials can give something new back to social scientists and social science historians, urging them to remake their tools.

Personal Reflections on the 1982 Special Anthropometric Issue of Social Science History

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley L. Engerman
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Human Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Bureau ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Christopher Lasch ◽  
Personal Reflections

Looking back at the more than 20 years that have gone by since the 1982 special issue of Social Science History, it is interesting to observe how important the study of anthropometric data has been in contributing to economic history and related disciplines.While there had been numerous earlier comments by contemporary observers as well as by scholars about heights and their implications as seen in JamesTanner's marvelous study, A History of the Study of Human Growth (1981), the systematic work that was reflected in the 1982 volume was then only about six or seven years old in the United States. It represented the early output of a study directed by Robert Fogel, primarily through the Development of the American Economy (DAE) project of the National Bureau of Economic Research.There had been a few previous publications including my own piece in Local Population Studies (Engerman 1976). My first use of the height-by-age data was in response to a dinnerparty conversation in 1974 with two ofmy colleagues in the Rochester history department:Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch.

scholarly journals Selection Bias and Social Science History

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris Inwood ◽  
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Selection Bias ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Science History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History

AbstractHistorians and social scientists routinely, and inevitably, rely on sources that are unrepresentative of the past. The articles in this special issue of the journal illustrate the widespread prevalence of selection bias in historical sources, and the ways in which historians negotiate this challenge to reach useful conclusions from valuable, if imperfect sources.

Computer Technology and the Source Materials of Social Science History

1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome M. Clubb
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Computer Technology ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Potential Source ◽  
Readable Form ◽  
Similar Vein ◽  
Source Materials

In his 1978 Presidential Address to this Association, Allan Bogue urged us to direct our attention to problems associated with the use and development of computer-readable source material (Bogue, 1979). My remarks are in a similar vein. They are limited, however, to only one of the categories of source material that Bogue discussed: information that is originally recorded and stored in computer-readable form. In this area problems have become substantially larger and more pressing than they seemed in 1978, although possible means to their amelioration are now also becoming more apparent. The problems concern, in the first place, the rapidly growing volume of potential source material that is recorded and stored in computer-readable form; and, in the second place, the danger that much of this material will not be preserved or that it will be preserved only in forms that sacrifice its central and crucial advantage of manipulability.

Reputed Changes in Social Scientists' Sympathies Regarding the Nature-Nurture Controversy: An Exploratory Comparison

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Evolutionary Genetic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Social Behavior

Probably the most enduring question throughout the history of the social sciences pertains to how much human social behavior is a product of evolutionary, genetic, nonsocial, “natural” sorts of variables as opposed to learned sociocultural, environmental, “nurturing” variables (Hammond, 1983). Regardless of where individual social scientists themselves happen to have settled on this issue, many have offered an opinion about the prevailing position of social scientists generally on this question at various points in social science history. The present study compares these opinions, especially as they pertain to the twentieth century.

Theory, Method, and Social Reproduction in Social Science History: A Short Jeremiad

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-499
Author(s):  
Charles Wetherell
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Formal Methods ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Theory Method ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Collective Enterprise

Let me begin with a simple theme, repentance, and a simple message: repent from complacency in the practice and defense of social science history (SSH). I say this because I do not see social science historians meeting three major challenges that must be overcome if the larger, collective enterprise is to survive with the same vitality it had a decade ago. Those challenges are, first, to bring social theory forcefully back into historical research; second, to take formal methods to a new, higher level; and, third, to seek to train the next generation of social science historians in the theory and methods they will need in the next century.

Politics and Research: Epistemological Moments

1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (01) ◽  
pp. 149-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adelaide H. Villmoare
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

In reading the essays by David M. Trubek and John Esser and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I thought about what I call epistemological moments that have provided contexts within which to understand the relationship between social science research and politics. I will sketch four moments and suggest that I find one of them more compelling than the others because it speaks particularly to social scientists with critical, democratic ambitions and to Trubek and Esser's concerns about politics and the intellectual vitality of the law and society movement.

Life Cycles in Social Science History

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-489
Author(s):  
Andrew Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Science History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of

When one is asked to speak on the past, present, and future of social science history, one is less overwhelmed by the size of the task than confused by its indexicality. Whose definition of social science history? Which past? Or, put another way, whose past? Indeed, which and whose present? Moreover, should the task be taken as one of description, prescription, or analysis? Many of us might agree on, say, a descriptive analysis of the past of the Social Science History Association. But about the past of social science history as a general rather than purely associational phenomenon, we might differ considerably. The problem of description versus prescription only increases this obscurity.

Is There a Place for Anthropology in Social Science History?

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-559
Author(s):  
Alice Bee Kasakoff
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Secure Place

Imagine a fourfold table in which one dimension is “present versus past” and the other “exotic versus home.” Traditionally, social and cultural anthropology’s domain has been the exotic’s present and history’s domain the home’s past. A third box, the home’s present, has been occupied by sociology, while the fourth, the exotic’s past, has usually been the province of anthropologists too because other disciplines—with the exception, perhaps, of ethnohistorians—are usually even less interested in exotic peoples’ past than in their present. These domains are now in flux. I argue, in what follows, that only when the oversimplified ideas about time and space that have created them are seriously questioned will anthropology find a secure “place” in social science history.

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