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By sociology Pareto means a synthesis of all the particular researches and disciplines dealing with human society—law, economics, political history, the history of religion, and so on—in a search for the relationships between social facts (1, 2). Sociology is to provide a framework into which will fit the results of these specialized studies; it is to be a comprehensive study which aims at discovering the principles underlying the form and changes of society in general.Such is Pareto's own formulation. It is apparent that he believes both that there are general principles underlying the form and changes of society, and that these can be discovered by a new discipline, sociology, working on the results of the specialized studies. The primary concern of the new discipline must therefore be methodology, and Pareto devotes much more attention to the problem of method in the social sciences than he does to the construction of his own theory of society. His justification for this is his belief that the methods of all previous sociologists have been basically faulty and can lead only to invalid conclusions. In this paper it is proposed to follow Pareto's emphasis, and to deal with his analysis of social facts and his general theory of society primarily with a view to bringing out those aspects which raise the problem of method in the social sciences.

The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subfields where this new work is appearing most rapidly: ( a) social network analysis and group formation; ( b) collective behavior and political sociology; ( c) the sociology of knowledge; ( d) cultural sociology, social psychology, and emotions; ( e) the production of culture; ( f) economic sociology and organizations; and ( g) demography and population studies. Our review reveals that sociologists are not only at the center of cutting-edge research that addresses longstanding questions about human behavior but also developing new lines of inquiry about digital spaces as well. We conclude by discussing challenging new obstacles in the field, calling for increased attention to sociological theory, and identifying new areas where computational social science might be further integrated into mainstream sociology.

The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subfields where this new work is appearing most rapidly: (a) social network analysis and group formation; (b) collective behavior and political sociology; (c) the sociology of knowledge; (d) cultural sociology, social psychology, and emotions; (e) the production of culture; (f) economic sociology and organizations; and (g) demography and population studies. Our review reveals that sociologists are not only at the center of cutting-edge research that addresses longstanding questions about human behavior but also developing new lines of inquiry about digital spaces as well. We conclude by discussing challenging new obstacles in the field, calling for increased attention to sociological theory, and identifying new areas where computational social science might be further integrated into mainstream sociology.

Teacher, scholar, and leader, Neil Smelser stands as an iconic figure in sociology in the second half of the twentieth century. The essays in this volume, written by prominent scholars from all walks of the social sciences, reveal the range and depth of Smelser's influence-and his substantial contributions to diverse fields such as British history, social change, collective behavior, higher education, the economy, and psychoanalysis. Contributors: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Nancy J. Chodorow, Burton R. Clark, Yiannis Gabriel, Arlie Russell Hochschild, James M. Jasper, Christian Joppke, Alberto Martinelli, Gary T. Marx, Lyn Spillman, Piotr Sztompka, R. Stephen Warner, Christine L. Williams, Robert Wuthnow, Viviana A. Zelizer

Acknowledgements -- Introduction: in search of sociology -- Problems in search of solutions : science, religion, and education in the -- Progressive era -- Neighborhood settlements : residence, research and reform -- Hull house : feminist pragmatism and the chicago women's school of sociology -- Back of the yards : the university of chicago settlement -- Chicago commons : settlement and social gospel in action -- Boston's south end house : a sociological laboratory -- The college settlements association : breaching gender and class in cities -- Henry street : where health became a public issue -- G greenwich house : the house that mary built -- Recovering a paradigm lost : public sociology then and now -- Appendix a: selected works of the chicago women's school of settlement sociology -- Appendix b: a comparison of some aspects of the urban sociology of south end house and University of Chicago sociologists -- References -- Archival collections -- Other internet resources used -- Index.

Instrumental variable (IV) methods provide a powerful but underutilized tool to address many common problems with observational sociological data. Key to their successful use is having IVs that are uncorrelated with an equation's disturbance and that are sufficiently strongly related to the problematic endogenous covariates. This review briefly defines IVs, summarizes their origins, and describes their use in multiple regression, simultaneous equation models, factor analysis, latent variable structural equation models, and limited dependent variable models. It defines and contrasts three methods of selecting IVs: auxiliary instrumental variable, model implied instrumental variable, and randomized instrumental variable. It provides overidentification tests and weak IV diagnostics as methods to evaluate the quality of IVs. I review the use of IVs in models that assume heterogeneous causal effects. Another section summarizes the use of IVs in contemporary sociological publications. The conclusion suggests ways to improve the use of IVs and suggests that there are many areas in which IVs could be profitably used in sociological research.

"Mechanisms are very much a part of social life. For example, we can see that inequality has tended to increase over time, and that cities can become segregated. But how do such mechanisms work? Analytical sociology is an influential approach to sociology which holds that explanations of social phenomena should focus on the social mechanisms that bring them about. This book evaluates the major features of this approach, focusing on the significance of the notion of mechanism. Leading scholars seek to answer a number of questions in order to explore all the relevant dimensions of mechanism based explanations in social sciences. How do social mechanisms link together individual actions and social environments? What is the role of multi agent modeling in the conceptualization of mechanisms? Does the notion of mechanism solve the problem of relevance in social sciences explanations?"--