Social Statistics and Public Policy for the 1990s: [Introduction]
本文介绍一组研究，探讨社会统计在公共政策中的应用，涵盖多层次模型、城市底层阶级、老龄化人口和人口普查调整等议题，强调宏观与微观互动。
At the core of each of the disparate disciplines called the social sciences there is the relationship-sometimes, the tension-between the individual and society. In theoretical jargon, many substantive problems turn on the connections between macro institutions and processes and micro institutions and processes. Many micro-macro interactions come easily to mind, evoking different disciplines of the social sciences: society and its institutions, the state and its citizens, the law and the organizations that enforce it, the economy and the enterprises that produce its goods, gross national product and individual entrepreneurial traits, organizations and their members, neighborhoods and their residents, birth rates and individual attitudes toward having children, schools and their pupils, social behavior and individual personality, economic growth and individual productivity, and cognitive processes and brain chemistry. One discipline's macro analysis may be another's micro analysis, and it is at such intersections that the disciplines often meet most productively. The articles in this special section are concerned to a greater or lesser degree with these macro-micro interactions. Together, they suggest the variety of topics in public policy for which researchers will analyze social statistics in the next decade and the variety of analytical methods that will be brought to bear. The article by Wong and Mason opens the section by elaborating on a generalization of the hierarchical linear model for multilevel analysis in comparative studies of different societies. Ethnic identity differentiates members of these societies in ways specific to each context. Their empirical example is of the dependence of fertility on the socioeconomic origins of women in less developed countries during the 1970s. This relationship is affected by the women's ethnic identities in ways specific to each country. Wong and Mason's article provides an example of a trend within the social sciences toward quantitative comparative analysis. Far too much of American social science has been built upon the shaky foundation of understanding only this one society, as if the United States in the twentieth century encompassed the whole of human diversity. From studies of this one society (or even of tiny aspects of it, such as groups of college sophomores), grand theories have been developed-theories regularly presumed to apply to all human societies at all times. Comparative analysis permits us to transcend the limitations of that approach, but at a significant price: We must find a means for taking into account contextual differences among the societies we seek to compare. The seeming impossibility of doing so has led some to conclude that comparative analysis is inherently meaningless. Wong and Mason offer a powerful analytical tool for overcoming this objection. That tool is surely needed to tackle the problems outlined by Pearson in his article on the American urban underclass. What are to be compared here are not countries but cities, neighborhoods, races, and ethnicities. The public policy question is difficult: Is there any set of policies that would halt or reverse the separation of a small proportion of the urban poor from the social and economic life of the nation? The analytical questions are perhaps more difficult: How can the macro effects of economic change in the cities be disentangled from the effects of social welfare policies or of neighborhood institutions and organizations, and how can these effects be disentangled from those of social networks, local demographics, discrimination, and rates of drug use and violent crime? Corder and Manton raise the macro-micro problem in a different guise: The aged are an increasing proportion of American society, but federal surveys and censuses do not yet provide fully satisfactory tracking of their health and functioning. The relationships of the aged to the institutions of society-the health care system, housing, families, pensions-are points of economic stress and political debate. The October 1990 federal budget crisis illustrated once again the dilemmas facing a society that seeks to reconcile its contract to provide health care and a decent living income for the aged with the constraint of slowing economic growth and rising needs in other sectors of society, including the urban underclass and children. Finally, Schirm deals with the macro-micro relationship between the estimation of the distribution of the U.S. population and the representation of each state in the U.S. House of Representatives. He shows that adjustment for the differential undercount of particular groups of the population would have minor effects on the apportionment of House seats. In addition, he examines some of the difficult public policy issues in light of his calculations and conclusions, including the sensitivity of different adjustment methods to assumptions about particular groups and the place of adjustment in relation to statistical accuracy and political equity. The impetus for this special section came from the Social Statistics Section of the association, which long has sought a way to employ the pages of JASA to demonstrate how social statistics can be brought to bear on issues of public policy. I express my appreciation to Abbott L. Ferriss, Mary G. Powers, Robert Parke, and Kirk M. Wolter, who served on a preliminary review panel, and to the more than 30 anonymous referees, many of whom gave authors helpful advice toward strengthening their articles.