ABSTRACT
From many sources, the principles of association, causal order, and nonspuriousness discussed in this selection are now part of the common sense of informed discourse. (Discourse that remains hard to find in current discussions of the so-called causes of delinquency.) They are especially significant in evaluating Hirschi's work because they impressed him early in his training, because they are independent of substantive theory, and because he relies so frequently on them in subsequent work. Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues honored this chapter from Hirschi and Selvin's Delinquency Research: An Appraisal of Analytic Methods by reprinting it in their Continuities in the Language of Social Research (Free Press, 1972). When asked to recall how the chapter came about, Hirschi focused on Table 2. “Table 2 is in some ways the heart of the entire book. I saw it my first semester in graduate school (1960) as a teaching assistant to William Nicholls, who did a great job with it in statistics lectures. It came to him from an article by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck by way of an article by Eleanor Maccoby, who had repercentaged it to good effect. Seven years(!) later, Selvin and I could be found using it to illustrate a variety of analytic principles. All of which shows how much interest there was at the time in clean and clear illustrations from real data of Lazarsfeld's elaboration model, and how hard they are to find.”—JHL/TH
