p.9 It will be a major thesis of this book that certain complications must be directly faced, hidden
assumptions brought out into the open, and complex "auxiliary measurement theories" constructed in order to deal simultaneously
with the objectives of achieving greater generalizability along with increased precision.
p.10 Another major message that I wish to convey is that the conceptual-measurement issues we face
in common throughout the social sciences are both technical and theoretical in nature. No "tricks of the trade" will
suffice to overcome them. Indeed, they are worthy of our best thinking and immediate and continued
attention, and they will be resolved, if at all, only very gradually.
p.11 This book is concerned with the twin topics of conceptualization and measurement and with how sociologists
and other social scientists can develop more effective strategies for integrating these two distinct processes so that theory
building and theory testing can be carried out on a more systematic basis.
p.17 Many of the variables of greatest interest to us are extremely difficult to measure,
even where they have been defined with great precision.
p.20 The only constructive stance that I can suggest is one that admits to the nature of the problem, distinguishes
between those theoretically defined variables that have and have not been associated with operational measures, attempts to
state explicitly the assumptions required to link the former theoretical constructs with their indicators, and then proceeds
to specify just what propositions can and cannot be tested with the data at hand.
p.21 there is general agreement that the real world can only be examined through our own perceptions of
it, and in particular our reliance on one or more of our human senses or extensions of these senses... If our sensory
apparatuses then tell us that in fact we are experiencing just what would be predicted... we can have more confidence in the
theoretical model... all of our evidence is highly indirect, but the degree of faith we have in our theory depends
upon its ability to provide consistently accurate predictions that would otherwise have been unexpected, or in its
adequacy to tie together previously unexplained observations
p.27-28 Although it is obviously desirable, in the abstract, to strive for theories that
are simultaneously parsimonious [JLJ - Parsimony is the scientific idea that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is the
best one], highly general, and therefore applicable to a wide range of phenomena, yet precise enough to imply rejectable hypotheses,
it does not appear possible within the social sciences to achieve simultaneously all three of these ideal characteristics.
If so, we shall need to make some difficult choices. As will become apparent in the remaining chapters, my own position is
that interests of realism dictate that, of the three, parsimony is the most expendable, whereas both
generalizability and precision seem absolutely essential to the advancement of sociology and the other social sciences.
