Stuart A. Rice

Some Applications of Statistical Method to Political Research

This paper deals with the applicability of statistical principles and methods to research in political science. The subject is virgin and comprehensive. At the outset it will be necessary to delimit the treatment to be given it here, and to state some of the premises upon which this treatment will be based. In the first place, the topic is unrelated to questions of public finance, or any of the bookkeeping aspects of government. I shall confine attention to more fundamental problems, distinctly psychological and sociological as well as political in character. These have to do with the nature and operation of forces that give rise to political activity and that determine its forms and its direction. A socio-political-psychology, quantitative in method, is the goal with respect to which orientation is sought. In the second place, only data of a kind now available for research will be considered. Every statistician will agree with Professor Merriams demand for the development and extension of governmental reporting, but my immediate concern is with undeveloped possibilities of utilizing existing materials. In the third place, the desirability of a quantitative approach to political research problems is taken for granted. Yet the statistical method has serious limitations, not merely because it can never replace logic as a means of interpretation, but also because it is not universally available for scientific inquiry. The developments of recent years in the field of abnormal psychology, for example, have no quantitative method of discovery behind them. When subjective processes give rise to or accompany behavior, measurements of the latter may be possible. But these measurements are no more than indices of states of conscious or unconscious mental activity.

Co-Ordination of Federal Statistical Programs

A statistical system implies coherence among separate programs, attained by co-ordination. Oversimplifications of the co-ordinations task, particularly in proposals for consolidations of agencies, result from failure to understand the relations between statistics and administration. The present statistical co-ordinati mechanism of the federal government and its two major functions-managerial control and programs planning-are described. Its place in the structure of government and its methods and procedures are indicated.

KATZ, DANIEL, and ALLPORT, FLOYD HENRY. Students' Attitudes: A Report of the Syracuse University Reaction Study. Pp. xxviii, 408. Syracuse, New York: The Craftsman Press, Inc., 1931

one cannot even mention the splendid list of authors and of topics selected by Professor Rice. The general sections deal with the delimitation of the fields; the definition of the objects of investigation; the establishment of units and scales; attempts to discover spatial distributions and temporal sequences; interpretations of change as a developmental stage; interpretations of temporal sequences with consideration of special types of &dquo;causation&dquo; ; interpretations of relationship among unmeasured factors, and among measured but experimentally uncontrolled factors; and attempts to determine quantitative relations among measured and experimentally controlled factors. This book is written by a committee of experts, each very highly competent in his own field. To be properly reviewed, it should be considered by a similarly diversified group. The reviewer feels competent in his own psychological field, much less competent for the ethnological and sociological fields, and entirely incompetent for such fields as history and business. On the whole, the psychological analyses are very well done. For example, R. M. Ogden has made an excellent comparison of the delimitation of the psychological field of Titchener as contrasted with the more recent Gestalt point of view. Although this contrast is excellently and critically made, it is difficult to understand just why these two &dquo;schools&dquo; of psychology have been chosen, when American Functionalism, Watsonian Behaviorism, and Freudian Psychoanalysis have been especially interested in and used as methods in social science, while the Structural and Gestalt points of view have contributed so little in this field-the first was not