Cleland, J

John Cleland

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Population Studies

Sociology as a Population Science

LSHTM Research Online

Cleland, J (2017) Sociology as a Population Science. Population stud-ies, 71 (1). pp. 133-134. ISSN 0032-4728 DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2016.1201269Downloaded from: http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/3515714/DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2016.1201269Usage GuidelinesPlease refer to usage guidelines at http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/policies.html or alterna-tively contact researchonline@lshtm.ac.uk.Available under license: Copyright the publishersFull Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpst20Download by: [London School of Hygiene & Trop Medicine] Date: 02 May 2017, At: 14:33Population StudiesA Journal of DemographyISSN: 0032-4728 (Print) 1477-4747 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpst20Sociology as a Population ScienceJohn ClelandTo cite this article: John Cleland (2017) Sociology as a Population Science, Population Studies,71:1, 133-134, DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2016.1201269To link to this article:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2016.1201269Published online: 17 Feb 2017.Submit your article to this journal Article views: 73View related articles View Crossmark dataBook reviewsSociology as a Population Science. 2016. By JOHNH.GOLDTHORPE. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press. Pp. ix + 168. £14.99 or US$24.99 paper-back. ISBN: 978-1-107-56731-3.John Goldthorpe has had a long and distinguishedcareer as a quantitative sociologist. He has contrib-uted more than anyone to an understanding ofsocial mobility in Britain. In this concise book, hepresents his vision of sociology as a populationscience, its disciplinary boundaries, and itsmethods of enquiry. Most of what he writes willbe highly congenial to social demographers and itis no coincidence that Goldthorpe’s two mostimportant mentors were Otis Dudley Duncan andDavid Glass, who taught him at the LondonSchool of Economics. Duncan, a pioneering quan-titative sociologist, used a population perspectivein his research and even wrote on demographicissues with Philip Hauser, a colleague at the Popu-lation Research and Training Center, University ofChicago (Hauser and Duncan 1959). Glass, ademographer, made important contributions tothe study of social mobility in addition to hismore formal demographic work (e.g., Glass 1954;Glass and Eversley 1965).Goldthorpe’s vision of his discipline is an indivi-dualistic one: individual action, despite constraints,retains autonomy and is accorded causal primacy.From individual variability regularities emerge,and the mandate of sociology is to identify andexplain these probabilistic regularities within het-erogeneous populations and sub-populations. Thisrequires statistical analyses of individual datasets, typically derived from large representativesample surveys. Multivariate analysis is needed todistinguish valid from spurious regularities butfalls short of establishing causation.While statistical analysis of data sets makes regu-larities visible, causal explanation seeks to makethem transparent by specifying the mechanismsthrough which they arise and are maintained. Thehypothesized mechanisms need to draw on theory,be adequate or sufficient to generate the regularityand, most importantly, be open to empirical confir-mation or rejection. Goldthorpe identifies two mainapproaches to mechanism-based explanation. Thefirst, associated with ‘analytical sociology’, is todraw upon a catalogue or toolkit of social mechan-isms, one example being social diffusion mechanisms(e.g., Palloni 2001). While this approach has theadvantage of allowing theoretical integration acrosssubstantive domains, it has the inherent danger ofprioritizing the mechanisms themselves and search-ing for examples that best illustrate their explanatorypower rather than seeking to account for observedpopulation regularities. Thus, the effect of causesrather than the causes of effects can become themain concern.The second main approach, less developed thanthe first but clearly favoured by the author, startswith the observed regularity and seeks to explainit, while accepting that more than one primesocial mechanism may operate. Simply appealingto values or norms is inadequate. What is requiredis an account of individual actions based on anassumption of bounded and subjective rationality,which may or may not conform to social norms.Three possible ways of establishing causal mechan-isms are outlined: direct observation throughintensive case studies; the more indirect way ofshowing that the hypothesized mechanisms implyother population regularities that can then beempirically verified; and, less commonly, in anexperimental way. A fourth method, which isbriefly mentioned in a footnote, is agent-basedcomputational modelling. This comprises the con-struction of a model of individual behaviour thatis capable of giving rise to the observed regularity.The example here is a model able to reproduceobserved regularities in age at first marriage(Todd et al. 2005). However, this method, whileadequate, cannot demonstrate that the mechan-isms embodied in the model do in fact bringabout the regularity of interest.In the concluding chapter Goldthorpe considersthe relationship of sociology to adjacent disci-plines. He sees great potential for closer collabor-ation between sociology, demography, and socialepidemiology, and envisages research centres ‘inwhich sociologists, demographers and social epide-miologists would be brought together and in whichresearch would be pursued on such lines that disci-plinary boundaries would be in large partPopulation Studies, 2017Vol. 71, No. 1, 133–137transcended’ (p. 132). In contrast he affirms a cleardistinction between history, concerned primarilywith explanations of particular events, and soci-ology concerned with regularities in events.Despite the emergence of behavioural economicsand the individualistic paradigm advanced in thisbook, he is sceptical of closer relationshipsbetween sociology and economics. In his viewmainstream economists remain largely uninter-ested in how everyday decisions are actuallymade and unwilling to subject strongly held the-ories to empirical tests.Goldthorpe is well aware that this book will offendmany sociologists because his vision implies amarked shrinking of the current diverse sociologicaldomain. But if sociology is to be accepted andadvance as a science, it should abandon much of itsplurality. He quotes Mies van der Rohe in concludingthat ‘less would be more’ (p. 127).This is an engaging and thought-provoking bookthat, in conjunction with similar arguments advancedby demographers (e.g., Billari 2015) and alternativeapproaches to causation in population studies (e.g.,Ni Bhrolchain and Dyson 2007), will be useful tosocial demographers in providing a clearer conceptualand methodological foundation for their research.ReferencesBillari, Francesco. 2015. Integrating macro- and micro-levelapproaches in the explanation of population change,Population Studies 69(Suppl 1): S11–S20.Glass, D. V. 1954. Social Mobility in Britain. London:Routledge, Kegan, Paul.Glass, D. V. and D. E. C. Eversley (eds). 1965. Population inHistory. Chicago: Aldine.Hauser, P. M. and O. D. Duncan (eds). 1959. The Studyof Population: An Inventory and Appraisal. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.Ni Bhrolchain, Maire and Tim Dyson. 2007. On causationin demography: Issues and illustrations, Populationand Development Review 33(1): 1–36.Palloni, Alberto. 2001. Diffusion in sociological analysis, inJohn B. Casterline (ed.), Diffusion Processes andFertility Transition. Washington, DC: NationalAcademy Press, pp. 66–114.Todd, Peter M., Francesco C. Billari, and Jorge Simao.2005. Aggregate age-at-marriage patterns from individ-ual mate-search heuristics,Demography 42(3): 559–574.© 2017 John ClelandLondon School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicinejohn.cleland@lshtm.ac.ukhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2016.1201269The Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of OurOrdinary Lives. 2016. By HELEN PEARSON.London: Allen Lane. Pp. x + 399. £20.00. ISBN:978–1-846-14826-2.This is an extraordinarily well-told story about theBritish Birth Cohorts and their sometimes rockyroad to international renown. It starts with asurvey, sponsored by the Population InvestigationCommittee (based at the London School of Econ-omics), of all births across Great Britain in oneweek of 1946. The story, but not the survey, endsas that cohort reaches the age of 70. Four othermajor studies also continue to follow theirmembers’ lives. (A sixth, which would have beenthe biggest of them all, suffered a sudden death ininfancy in 2015.) These studies have been accumu-lating a mass of data on the health, and social andeconomic experience of ‘ordinary people’ as theirlives unfold. The book’s prose style is aimed at ageneral reader:When the first birth cohort was recruiting, all themothers took part because they felt an obligationto do their bit for the country. By the time of thefifth [Millennium], that sentiment seemed as laugh-ably out of date as rationing and hand-knittedvests. (p. 265)The gripping and well-crafted narrative is enlivenedby a few biographical vignettes of cohort members,who consented to their inclusion, and some anec-dotes about study leaders. The author’s skills as ascience journalist are applied to non-technical expla-nations of such topics as the Foetal Origins Hypoth-esis, epigenetics, Mendelian randomization, inducedpluripotent stem cells, regression to the mean, andrelative vs. absolute social mobility.Readers of this journal may be aware of the role ofDavid Glass in the design of the early stages of the1946 cohort study, and that of James Douglas, whotook the project forward. The concern about thecountry’s low fertility, which had largely promptedthe study, was overtaken by the unanticipated post-war baby boom, but the study’s findings about thecost and pain of childbirth helped improve maternityservices in the soon-to-be-introduced NationalHealth Service. The study also established a baselineof social inequalities that were still evident when thislongest running cohort entered old age. The cohortstudies which came later continued to chart socialdifferences in life chances.The next two studies of cohorts, one of childrenborn in one week of 1958 and the other in oneweek of 1970, with approximately 17,000 births134 Book reviews