Rule of Three, Let It Be? When More Really Is Better

Jim Ray and others in this issue question customary procedures for the quantitative analysis of theoretically complex questions in the social sciences. In this article we address Ray's use of research on the Kantian peace to illustrate his points. We discuss his five guidelines for research, indicating how we agree and disagree, and take up five substantive issues he has raised about our research. With new analyses to supplement our previous work, we show that none of his reservations is well founded. We discuss the costs as well as the benefits of rigid insistence on reducing the number of independent variables in a regression equation.

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