ABSTRACT
The techniques of practical social research aim at reducing the variety of subjective opinions, attitudes, and behaviour from which it claims to establish the nature of objective social institutions and processes, and to reduce them to quantitative units, correlating them so as to obtain the greatest possible accuracy in the statements it formulates as its hypotheses. The new techniques developed in the social survey comply with the old-established demands of inductive logic; it is as a science operating with the inductive method that sociology now more and more presents itself, for fear that it might fall back again into speculation. The application of statistical methods may be said to have established its validity in American sociology beyond all dispute. Quantitative methods were used in social survey work even before World War I, usually to assist some administrative action. The old-style survey has developed into empirical social research that regards itself as a systematic method of examining hypotheses.
