Statistics and Sociology: the Mutually-Supportive Development from the Perspective of Interdisciplinarization of Social Research
Statistics and Sociology: the Mutually-Supportive Development from the Perspective of Interdisciplinarization of Social Research

Summary/Abstract: Statistics emerged as a scientific discipline and has been developed as such, especially extensively over the past century, not only due to an extraordinary service it provides to other disciplines but also thanks to ideas, questions and approaches originally formulated in different fields of empirical research, including sociology, which also contributed to statistics. The confluence of developments in these two disciplines (statistics and sociology) seems to be one of the most successful and beneficial for both of them. Yet, it has become a focus of systematic reflection only recently. The aim of this paper is to make a concise overview of the logical scheme of this interaction and to stress the importance of the counterfactual causal modeling being currently under constant refinement. A more explicit formula of interdisciplinarization that underlies such an interaction anyway would add to overcoming the methodological challenges it poses to either discipline. While contributing to the advancement of ‘cause-and-effect’ oriented quantitative sociology this would enhance methodology of social science research in general.

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