Social Science Concepts: A User's Guide - Brossura

Goertz, Gary

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0691124116 ISBN 13: 9780691124117

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2005

Riassunto

Concepts lie at the core of social science theory and methodology. They provide substance to theories; they form the basis of measurement; they influence the selection of cases. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide explores alternative means of concept construction and their impact on the role of concepts in measurement, case selection, and theories.


While there exists a plethora of books on measurement, scaling, and the like, there are virtually no books devoted to the construction and analysis of concepts and their role in the research enterprise. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide provides detailed and practical advice on the construction and use of social science concepts; a Web site provides classroom exercises.


It uses a wide range of examples from political science and sociology such as revolution, welfare state, international disputes and war, and democracy to illustrate the theoretical and practical issues of concept construction and use. It explores the means of constructing complex, multilevel, and multidimensional concepts. In particular, it examines the classic necessary and sufficient condition approach to concept building and contrasts it with the family resemblance approach. The consequences of valid concept construction are explored in both qualitative and quantitative analyses.



Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide will prove an indispensable guide for graduate students and scholars in the social sciences. More broadly, it will appeal to scholars in any field who wish to think more carefully about the concepts used to create theories and research designs.




For Course Use:




Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide has been written with classroom use in mind. Many of the chapters have been successfully taught at the Annual Training Institute on Qualitative Research Methods which is sponsored by the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods. Feedback from those experiences has been incorporated into the text. Each chapter provides useful, practical, and detailed advice on how to construct, evaluate, and use concepts. To make the volume more useful, an extensive set of classroom exercises is available from the author's Web page at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ggoertz/social_science_concepts.html. These include questions about prominent published work on concepts, measures, and case selection; in addition there are logic exercises and questions regarding large-N applications.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Gary Goertz is Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Contexts of International Politics and International Norms and Decision Making: A Punctuated Equilibrium Model, and the coauthor of War and Peace in International Rivalry.

Dalla quarta di copertina

"Gary Goertz is at the forefront of a number of important methodological debates. He is one of the very few scholars who regularly crosses the boundary between quants and quals, and this book reflects his strength in both areas."--John Gerring, Boston University

"Goertz reaffirms with great success a foundational idea established more than three decades ago by Giovanni Sartori: concept analysis is an indispensable component of social science methodology, and we neglect it at our peril."--David Collier, University of California, Berkeley

"One of the greatest challenges facing the social sciences today is the task of cultivating a closer connection between theoretical concepts and empirical analysis. In this book, Gary Goertz lays the foundation for a new approach to social scientific concepts and demonstrates the many benefits that follow from the thoughtful articulation of concepts in social research."--Charles Ragin, University of Arizona at Tucson, author of Fuzzy-Set Social Science

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Social Science Concepts

A User's GuideBy Gary Goertz

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12411-7

Contents

List of Tables............................................................................................viiList of Figures...........................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................................................xiChapter One Introduction.................................................................................1PART ONE THEORETICAL, STRUCTURAL, AND EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTS.....................................25Chapter Two Structuring and Theorizing Concepts..........................................................27Chapter Three Concept Intension and Extension............................................................69Chapter Four Increasing Concept-Measure Consistency......................................................95Chapter Five Substitutability and Weakest-Link Measures with William F. Dixon............................129PART TWO CONCEPTS AND CASE SELECTION.....................................................................157Chapter Six Concepts and Selecting (on) the Dependent Variable with J. Joseph Hewitt.....................159Chapter Seven Negative Case Selection: The Possibility Principle with James Mahoney......................177Chapter Eight Concepts and Choosing Populations with J. Joseph Hewitt....................................211PART THREE CONCEPTS IN THEORIES..........................................................................235Chapter Nine Concepts in Theories: Two-Level Theories with James Mahoney.................................237References................................................................................................269Exercises and Web Site....................................................................................289Index.....................................................................................................291

Chapter One

Introduction

To define a thing, is to select from among the whole of its properties those which shall be understood to be designated and declared by its name; the properties must be very well known to us before we can be competent to determine which of them are fittest to be chosen for this purpose.

Every proposition consists of two names [concepts]: and every proposition affirms or denies one of these names, of the other.... Here, therefore, we find a new reason why the signification of names, and the relation generally, between names and the things signified by them, must occupy the preliminary stage of the inquiry we are engaged in. J. S. Mill

John Stuart Mill began his System of Logic with a "book" devoted to concepts. Starting with concepts was a logical choice since they are some of the main building blocks for constructing theoretical propositions. Propositional logic involves the proper manipulation of symbols. For this to have usefulness in science these symbols need to be given substantive content. In this book I show how one can construct substantive concepts and discuss the implications for empirical (qualitative and quantitative) research of different concept structures.

In spite of the primordial importance of concepts, they have received relatively little attention over the years by social scientists. Giovanni Sartori and David Collier stand out as the dominating figures in the work on concepts. Yet the contrast with the massive literature on quantitative measures, indicators, scales, and the like cannot be more extreme. Hence we have a paradox: as Mill noted, concepts are a central part of our theories, yet researchers, apart from Sartori and Collier, have focused very little attention on social science concepts per se (though see Ragin 2000).

This paradox has arisen in part from the deep differences between quantitative and qualitative scholars. As a matter of the sociology of social science (at least in political science and sociology), qualitative scholars have been most concerned with concepts—which are generally seen as nonmathematical and deal with substantive issues—while quantitative researchers have focused on scaling, indicators, reliability, and other issues dealing with producing good quantitative measures.

In this book I straddle this gap (or chasm if you prefer) between the qualitative scholars' concern for substantively valid concepts and the quantitative scholars' interest in good numerical measures. As the title of this volume indicates, it will not be a balanced treatment: it will focus on concepts. However, I develop the methodological and mathematical implications of concepts for the design and building of quantitative measures. As Lazarsfeld and Barton said decades ago:

[B]efore we can investigate the presence or absence of some attribute ... or before we can rank objects or measure them in terms of some variable, we must form the concept of that variable. (1951, 155, my emphasis)

While we all pay lip service to the mantra that theory should guide methodology, it is often the case that the cart is leading the horse. Symptomatic of this is the Jaggers and Gurr discussion of the polity concept of democracy (1995). Their analysis of the concept of democracy is in fact located in the section entitled "Operationalizing Democracy": clearly the focus is on the quantitative measure, not on the concept. In contrast, I shall spend a lot of time on the various conceptualizations of democracy, and only afterward will I analyze the downstream consequences for quantitative measures.

Given the division between quantitative and qualitative scholars it is hard for anyone to keep her attention focused on both at the same time. Goertz's Second Law says:

The amount of attention devoted to a concept is inversely related to the attention devoted to the quantitative measure.

The contrast between Collier and Bollen on democracy illustrates this law in action. Collier and Mahon (1993) provide an insightful analysis of the concept(s) of democracy, but give little guidance on how one might put these ideas into quantitative action. Bollen has made major contributions to the literature on the quantitative measures of democracy, but his discussions of the concept of democracy rarely exceed a few sentences.

This book thus tries to violate Goertz's Second Law. I analyze in detail the major ways one can build concepts, but I do not stop there. I continue the analysis by examining how different concept structures have important methodological implications for the construction of quantitative measures. For example, as chapter 4 on democracy shows, to be faithful to one's concepts implies measures quite different from those that one finds in the quantitative literature on democracy indicators, scales, etc.

The publication of the book by King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) relaunched the debate about the distinctiveness, or lack thereof, of qualitative methods. The formation in 2003 of the Qualitative Methods section of the American Political Science Association was one response to the King et al. challenge. This new section has created three awards, one of which is the Giovanni Sartori Book Award. Going back to Sartori's famous 1970 article, one finds that much of it is an attack on quantitative methods. In contrast, I shall take concepts very seriously, but at the same time I shall develop formal and mathematical models of how most qualitative theorists construct concepts. My analysis thus cuts both ways: it finds that some of Sartori's claims must be seriously qualified; it also finds that many quantitative measures do not fit well with the concepts they are supposed to reflect.

* * *

Much of the literature on concepts takes what I call a semantic approach (Sartori 1970, 1984; Gerring 1997). Sartori typifies this way of thinking about concepts. For example, the first half of his essay (1984) deals with a semantic analysis of words such as "state" or "état." From a more philosophical perspective, concepts are related to definitions; in fact there is no real difference between defining a word and providing an analysis of a concept (Robinson 1950). To ask questions like "what do you mean by democracy?" is to invite the interlocutor to provide a definition. The answer does not really differ from the response to the question "what is your concept of democracy?"

In contrast, this volumes argues that a concept involves a theoretical and empirical analysis of the object or phenomenon referred to by the word. A good concept draws distinctions that are important in the behavior of the object. The central attributes that a definition refers to are those that prove relevant for hypotheses, explanations, and causal mechanisms. In a theoretical and empirical view of scientific concepts their semantics change as our understanding of the phenomenon changes. Take the example of "copper": the very definition or concept of copper has changed, reflecting new knowledge generated by chemists.

Indicative of a more literary and philosophical approach, Sartori (1984) starts with the classic problem of translation. Should état in French be translated as "state" or "government" in English? Another classic chestnut is the translation of the Italian Renaissance concept of virtú. Notice that my standard examples are not problematic in this sense: the concept of copper in English does not differ from cuivre in French. This is because English and French chemists have the same atomic theory of copper. The debate over the definition of corporatism, for example, is not about its definition per se, but about the phenomenon (real life) of corporatism.

Lurking in the background is the issue of nominalism versus realism. At the level of semantic signs, there is no debate; the words, signs, or symbols we use to designate phenomena are arbitrary. For example, Babbie in his popular textbook on social research (2001) expounds an extreme nominalist view regarding concepts. He puts himself in the Red Queen's camp on the issue of meaning and what determines it. More generally, all those who focus purely on semantic issues are liable to end up seeing definitions as arbitrary. If the concept is not intimately related to the empirical analysis of a phenomenon then there is nothing to which one can anchor the concept, and everything becomes a matter of who is in charge of the definition. For example, communist countries were often called people's "democratic" republics; this usage was an abuse of political and semantic power. If we were to change our definition of democracy to accommodate these countries then our hypotheses about democracy would have to change as well. Likewise, we cannot divorce our concept of corporatism from how corporatism fits into theories, as either an independent or dependent variable.

The alternative to the nominalist view of concepts can be called, not surprisingly, the realist perspective on concepts and definitions. This distinction goes back at least to Locke, but probably all the way to Aristotle. Both philosophers distinguished between "essential" and "superficial" characteristics of an object. Change in essential characteristics constituted a change in kind, while changes in superficial traits—"nominal" in Locke's terminology—didnot result in a change in kind. For example, a change in a democratic regime from presidential to parliamentary does not entail a change from a democratic to authoritarian regime. However, take away essential properties, say, civil rights, and the regime changes its fundamental character. To go back to chemistry, a change in temperature of an element does not mean a change in its classification in the chemical table, while a change in the number of electrons does.

Concepts are theories about ontology: they are theories about the fundamental constitutive elements of a phenomenon. While many quantitative scholars may find the term "ontological" provocative and many interpretativists may object to my usage, I use the term in a straightforward way to designate the core characteristics of a phenomenon and their interrelationships. For example, we can ask about what constitutes a welfare state. Typically, these are states that provide goods and services like unemployment insurance, medical services, retirement benefits, and the like. To be a welfare state is to provide these goods and services.

In short, I propose a causal, ontological, and realist view of concepts. It is an ontological view because it focuses on what constitutes a phenomenon. It is causal because it identifies ontological attributes that play a key role in causal hypotheses, explanations, and mechanisms. It is realist because it involves an empirical analysis of the phenomenon. My approach stresses that concept analysis involves ascertaining the constitutive characteristics of a phenomenon that have central causal powers. These causal powers and their related causal mechanisms play a role in our theories. A purely semantic analysis of concepts, words, and their definitions is never adequate by itself

* * *

A core theme running throughout this volume is that the structure of concepts is crucial. As the literature on scales, indicators, and the like illustrates, there are many ways to construct a quantitative measure. Apart from the few key articles by Collier and his colleagues there is little or no discussion on the different ways one can construct concepts.

I stress that most important concepts we use are multidimensional and multilevel in nature. For example, Sartori's (1970) article talks about high-, medium-, and low-level categories while Collier and Mahon (1993) use the terminology of primary and secondary categories. I prefer to use the framework of "three-level" concepts.

The most important level theoretically is usually the concept as used in theoretical propositions, such as "corporatism," "democracy," or "welfare state." This I refer to as the basic level. It is "basic" in the sense of Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues; it is cognitively central. It is the noun to which we attach adjectives (Collier and Levitsky 1997) such as parliamentary democracy or democratic corporatism. The basic level is what we use in theoretical propositions.

The next level down from the basic level is what I call the secondary level. For example, when we say that democracy consists of civil rights, competitive elections, and so forth, we are descending to the secondary level to give the constitutive dimensions of the basic-level democracy concept. It is when we move down to the secondary level that the multidimensional character of concepts appears. The secondary-level dimensions form much of the ontological analysis of concepts. They also play a central role in causal mechanisms of various sorts.

The next level down I call the indicator/data level. Alternatively, it could be called the operationalization level. At this level we get specific enough that data can be gathered, which permits us to categorize—either dichotomously or on a more fine-grained scale—whether or not a specific phenomenon, individual, or event falls under the concept.

In summary, we can dissect and analyze concepts by (1) how many levels they have, (2) how many dimensions each level has, and (3) what is the substantive content of each of the dimensions at each level.

Table 1.1 illustrates that most of the prominent efforts to conceptualize democracy have a three-level character. With the partial exception of Coppedge and Reinicke, all see democracy as a multidimensional, multilevel concept. Because democracy is a complex concept it is important to analyze its component parts. Typically, one includes secondary-level dimensions like "competition" (i.e., for office) and "participation" (i.e., voting) in what it means to be a democracy. The secondary-level dimensions remain part of the theoretical edifice, but they are concrete enough to be operationalized by the indicator/data level. The third indicator/data level is where we get down to actual empirical data. For example, typically there are multiple indicators of secondary-level factors like participation and competition. These indicators are the variables that are actually coded for and form the bases of quantitative measures.

The second aspect of concept structure that I explore is how components at one level are combined or structured to produce dimensions at the next higher level. The basic-level concept of democracy is constituted by multiple secondary-level dimensions: how are these dimensions "combined" to arrive at the basic-level concept?

Throughout this book I continually contrast two different structural principles for constructing multidimensional and multilevel concepts. The first goes back to Aristotle and builds concepts using the structure of necessary and sufficient conditions. In classic philosophical logic to define a concept is to give the conditions necessary and sufficient for something to fit into the category. Each of these necessary conditions is a secondary-level dimension: the structural glue that binds the secondary-level dimensions together to form the basic level is the mathematics of necessary and sufficient conditions.

The necessary and sufficient condition view of concepts was so standard that Sartori (1970) just assumes it. However, developments in philosophy, logic, and cognitive psychology have shown that there are other ways to construct concepts. I shall focus on the "family resemblance" concept structure which is in many ways the polar opposite of the necessary and sufficient condition one. In their groundbreaking article Collier and Mahon (1993) introduced the idea of family resemblance concepts into the political science literature. The family resemblance structure can be seen as the opposite of the necessary and sufficient condition one because it contains no necessary conditions. All one needs is enough resemblance on secondary-level dimensions to be part of the family. For example, in chapter 6 I discuss two concepts used in the study of international conflict. The concept of a "crisis" according the the International Crisis Behavior group (Brecher, Wilkenfeld, and Moser 1988) uses the classic necessary and sufficient condition approach to concepts, while the idea of a "militarized interstate dispute" (Jones, Bremer, and Singer 1995) uses a family resemblance–like approach.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691124116
• ISBN 13: 9780691124117
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 296
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile