Quantification - Social Sciences

Social Sciences

In the social sciences, quantification is an integral part of economics and psychology. Both disciplines gather data—economics by empirical observation and psychology by experimentation, and both use statistical techniques such as regression analysis to draw conclusions from it.

In some instances a seemingly intangible property may be quantified by asking subjects to rate something on a scale—for example, a happiness scale or a quality of life scale—or by the construction of a scale by the researcher, as with the index of economic freedom. In other cases, an unobservable variable may be quantified by replacing it with a proxy variable with which it is highly correlated—for example, per capita gross domestic product is often used as a proxy for standard of living or quality of life.

Frequently in the use of regression, the presence or absence of a trait is quantified by employing a dummy variable, which takes on the value 1 in the presence of the trait or the value 0 in the absence of the trait.

Quantitative linguistics is an area of linguistics that relies on quantification. For example, indices of grammaticalization of morphemes, such as phonological shortness, dependence on surroundings, and fusion with the verb, have been developed and found to be significantly correlated across languages with stage of evolution of function of the morpheme.