Statistics In The Social And Behavioral Sciences

This survey paper gives an impression of the main ways in which statistics is used in disciplines such as sociology and psychology. After an introductory section 1 the negative image of social science research is discussed in section 2. Section 3 is devoted to the enormous influence of modern computing facilities. Measurement of human behaviour has its specific problems (section 4). The use of linear and log–linear models is the topic of section 5. Latent variables are a basic concept for social and behavioral scientists, both in some linear models (section 6) and in item response theory (section 7). In the next section multidimensional and optimal scaling techniques are mentioned, and a selection of other topics is the content of section 9. Some general remarks on the generalizability claim of statistical methods constitute the final section. Because of space limitations and priority considerations, the author has decided to write a paper about topics and not about individual research contributions. For this reason there is no list of references (it would take several pages) and no painful split of all Dutch authors into those mentioned and those omitted. In general the Dutch research community has made quite a few major contributions to the area discussed in this paper.