ABSTRACT
We have discussed, in earlier chapters, the bulk of quantitative techniques that have been used by historians; until recently few books or articles on historical topics made use of more complicated methods than those, such as frequency distributions, measures of central tendency and of dispersion, and methods of time series analysis, that we have described. The use of these statistical methods has produced a very large amount of important historical work. Yet a historian who is willing to use quantitative techniques should not stop at this stage, but should be willing to use other, more complicated methods which will help him in the analysis of historical materials. It is impossible in this book to discuss all such methods, and we shall therefore concentrate in this chapter on techniques that explore a central problem in the writing of history – that of the relationship between two sets of historical events. The methods that will be discussed fall under the general heading of ‘correlation and regression techniques’.
