Abstract
A detailed account of comparative methodology or cross-national research in the social sciences is not possible here, although such a work is needed.1 It is important, however, to indicate the purposes of cross-national research and the possibilities and limitations of such research in Africa. The discussion here is designed primarily to speak to professional social scientists and “Africanists,” some of whom may be either dubious of the value of comparative research using aggregate data on macro-social entities such as countries, or skeptical of the validity of quantitative, comparative analysis.
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Notes
A general review of comparative methodology is Robert M. Marsh, Comparative Sociology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967)
Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970)
Richard L. Merritt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Comparing Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)
Stein Rokkan, ed., Comparative Research Across Cultures and Nations (Paris: Mouton, 1968)
R. D. Brunner and G. D. Brewer, Organized Complexity: Empirical Theories of Political Development (New York: Free Press, 1971)
T. R. Gurr, Politimetrics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972)
G. Almond, ed., Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston: Little Brown, 1973)
R. Naroll and R. Cohen, A Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology (Garden City: Natural History Press, 1970)
E. R. Tufte, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974)
R. Brislin, W. Lonner, R. Thorndike, Cross-Cultural Research Methods (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1973).
David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (New York: Van Nostrand, 1961), p. viii.
See Henry C. Bretton, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Praeger, 1966).
Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, “Equivalence in Cross-National Research,” Public Opinion Quarterly 30 (1966–67): 552.
Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (San Francisco: Chandler, 1964), p. 79.
See the excellent discussion in Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1966).
See John N. Paden, “African Concepts of Nationhood,” in The African Experience, eds., John N. Paden and Edward W. Soja, Vol. I (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1970)
Colin Legum, Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide, Revised edition (New York: Praeger, 1965)
Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism (London: Longmans, 1969).
See William Zartman. International Relations in the New African States (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966).
See V. Thompson’s book West Africa’s Council of the Entente (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).
For a consideration of the problems of regional variation in the universe of nation-states, see the chapter on “Regionalism versus Universalism in Comparing Nations,” in World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, Bruce M. Russett, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 322–340; and the empirical analysis in P. Coulter, Social Mobilization and Liberal Democracy (Lexington: Heath, 1975).
Phillipe C. Schmitter, “New Strategies for the Comparative Analysis of Latin American Politics,” Latin American Research Review, 4 (1969), 83–110.
The kind of argument we have in mind here is best exemplified in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).
G. Almond and S. Verba eds. The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
This is the form of the argument made most often in the literature, from Lipset’s Political Man to an exploration of this question in Marvin E. Olsen, “Multivariate Analysis of National Political Development,” American Sociological Review, 33 (1968): 699–712.
See the discussion in Robert F. Winch and Donald T. Campbell, “Proof? No. Evidence? Yes. The Significance of Tests of Significance,” The American Sociologist, 4 (1969): 140–43.
This discussion is necessarily condensed, for details on different points the reader should consult Merritt and Rokkan, eds., Comparing Nations,; Rokkan, ed. Comparative Research across Cultures and Nations; Charles Louis Taylor, ed., Aggregate Data Analysis: Political and Social Indicators in Cross-National Research (The Hague: Mouton, 1968)
Oran Young, “Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor,” World Politics 21 (April, 1969): 486–511.
For a discussion of this issue see H. R. Alker, Jr., “A Typology of Ecological Fallacies,” in Quantitative Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences M. Dogan and S. Rokkan, eds. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1969).
Fred N. Kerlinger, Foundations of Behavioral Research 2nd edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975).
Donald T. Campbell and Donald W. Fiske, “Convergent and Discriminant Validation by the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix,” Psychological Bulletin, 50 (1959): 81–105.
Examples of empirical studies which rely on constructed indices from several indicators include Irma Adelman and C. T. Morris, Society, Politics and Economic Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967)
Arthur S. Banks and Robert B. Textor, A Cross-Polity Survey (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1963)
Raymond F. Bauer, Social Indicators (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1966.
Bruce M. Russett, et al., World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 118.
See Ole Holsti, “The Quantitative Analysis of Content,” in Content Analysis, ed., Robert C. North, et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 49–50
The classic statement of philosophical operationalism is in Percy W. Bridgeman, The Logic of Modern Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
H. M. Blalock, Jr., “The Measurement Problem: A Gap Between the Languages of Theory and Research,” Methodology in Social Research eds., H. Blalock, Jr., and A. Blalock (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 5–27.
A more specific example of this problem relates to the use of measures of vehicles per capita as an operationalization of horizontal integration, or communications potential in African nations. The difficulty is illustrated by Weinstein: “Even though there is supposed to be one passenger vehicle for every 127 inhabitants (in Gabon), compared with one vehicle for every 180 in the four states of the former federation (AEF), only 6% of all vehicles are used for interior road transportation (in Gabon), compared with 25% in Chad.” Brian Weinstein, Gabon: Nation Building on the Ogoowe (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1966), 76.
A particularly blunt critique was given by Arnold S. Feldman in a review of cross-national research in Latin America. See “The New Comparative Politics in Latin America: A Comment,” commentary delivered to Latin Anerican Studies Association, New York City, 8 November, 1968. See also the commentary on D. P. Bwy, “Political Instability in Latin America: The Cross-Cultrual Test of a Causal Model,” Latin American Research Review, 3 (1963): 17–66.
For a detailed discussion, and for examples of this mode of index construction, see D. G. Morrison Political Learning: Conflict and Violence in Black Africa, forthcoming, and for a technical discussion of the approach see D. F. Alwin, “The Use of Factor Analysis in the Construction of Linear Composites in Social Research,” Sociological Methods and Research 2, 2 (November), 1973, 191–214
K. W. Smith, “On Estimating the Reliability of Composite Indices Through Factor Analysis,” Sociological Methods and Research, 2, 4 (May, 1974), 485–510.
See Donald T. Campbell and Donald W. Fiske, “Convergent and Discriminant Validation by the Multi-trait—Mulit-method Matrix,” Psychological Bulletin, 56 (1959): 82–105
J. Caparoso and L. Roos, eds., Quasi-Experimental Approaches: Testing Theory and Evaluating Policy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
For a review of this argument, and its particular application to anthropological data, see Raoul Naroll, Data Quality Control (New York: Free Press, 1962).
For a thorough review of this field, see J. Nunnaly, Psychometric Theory (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980).
William S. Robinson, “Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals,” American Sociological Review, 15 (1950): 351–357.
This “true” score is defined as the observed score minus error due to measurement in that observation. For a discussion of this model see F. M. Lord and M. R. Novick Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1968).
See, for example, Ivo K. Feierabend, Rosalind L. Feierabend, and Betty A. Nesvold, “Social Change and Political Violence: Cross-National Patterns,” in The History of Violence in America, eds., Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 632–687.
See the data reported in Russett, et al., World Handbook; Arthur S. Banks and Robert Textor, A Cross-Polity Survey (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1963)
C. L. Taylor and M. Hudson, World Handbook 2nd edition. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
Of the principal cross-national research, Gurr includes 23 “non-Islamic” African countries in his analysis, the Feierabends include four of our countries, and Rummel includes only one. See Graham and Gurr, eds., A History of Violence in America; and Rudolph J. Rummel, “Indicators of Cross-National and International Patterns,” American Political Science Review, 73 (September, 1967): 145–72.
For a discussion of the very complex issues involved in the treatment of time in behavioral sciences, see C. W. Harris, ed., Problems in Measuring Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967)
D. Hibbs, Jr., “Problems of Statistical Estimation and Causal Inference in Time-Series Regression Models,” in Sociological Methodology, 1973–1974, H. Costnered. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974).
See the arguments for the differences in relationships between social, political and economic variables in sub-groups of the less-developed countries in Irma Adelman and Cynthia Taft Morris, Society, Politics and Economic Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967)
An elaboration of this point is Edward R. Tufte, “Improving Data Analysis in Political Science,” World Politics, 21 (1969): 640–654.
A discussion of this and other techniques is contained in Hayward R. Alker, Jr., “Statistics and Politics: The Need for Causal Data Analysis,” in Politics and the Social Sciences, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 244–313.
Basic reviews of simultaneous equation methods are A. S. Gold-berger, Econometric Theory (New York: John Wiley, 1965)
J. Johnston, Econometric Methods (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963)
H. Theil, Principles of Econometrics (New York: Wiley, 1971).
Hubert Blalock, Jr., Causal Inference in Non-Experimental Research (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1964).
See Sewall Wright, “Path Coefficients and Path Regressions: Alternative or Complimentary Concepts?” Biometrics, 16 (1960): 189–202
Otis Dudley Duncan, Jr., “Path Analysis: Sociological Examples,” American Journal of Sociology, 72 (1966): 1–16
Kenneth Land, “Principles of Path Analysis,” in Sociological Methodology 1969 ed. Edgar Borgatta (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1969)
Richard P. Boyle, “Path Analysis and Ordinal Data,” American Journal of Sociology, 75 (1970): 461–480.
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Morrison, D.G., Mitchell, R.C., Paden, J.N. (1989). Comparative Analysis of African Nations: On the Uses and Limitations of Cross-National Data. In: Black Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11023-0_8
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