Prologue

Abstract

This is the second volume of Sociological Methodology (SM) under my editorship. The work presented here spanned several years in that some of the papers were initially reviewed and/or accepted under previous editors. Most of the contributions included here exemplify the principle articulated by Jim Davis in the epigraph to the dedication, that the focus of substantive interests of sociologists may be capricious, but their methods are cumulative. This is apparent from the papers published here, which cover a broad range of methodological problems and are grounded in prior innovations and extend that work. We have organized the material in the present volume into seven major sections: (1) a symposium on dynamic network models, (2) more on social network models, (3) multiplicative models for continuous dependent variables, (4) causal inference, (5) decomposing segregation, (6) survey measurement, and (7) data visualization.