From Surveys to Paradigms, Leading to a More General Philosophy of Social Science

I will show in this presentation how I went from surveys to paradigms, leading finally to a more general philosophy of social science during the last fifteen years. I undertook during the 1970’s social network surveys in order to understand the migration process, and they were also used for network analysis. During the 1980’s I undertook one of the first event history survey to understand the internal logic of family, professional and migratory events. Lastly during the 1990’s I reconstituted from Norwegian population registers and censuses the life of two exhaustive generations in order to understand how multilevel analysis may extend demography. At the end of the 1990’s after an attack against event history analysis, I tried to give a paradigmatic view of the history of demography. From Graunt to the end of World War II a cross-sectional aggregate paradigm was the norm, introducing regression analysis. At the end of World War II an alternative vision of time permitted a new longitudinal paradigm to take place. However at the beginning of the 1980’s some problems encountered with this last paradigm lead to an event history one permitting to introduce time regression methods. Finally at the end of the 1980’s the necessity to introduce a more complex society with its different levels, leads to multilevel network analysis. During the last fifteen years I went towards a deeper reflexion about epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of social science. Agent-based models even if they lead, by their bottom-up approach to, appealing properties, are shown to be not sufficiently grounded. There is finally a need to introduce a model based program, complementing the four extant paradigms while incorporating insights gained from model-based science. This program must conform the classical scientific research programme which tries to infer the functional structure which rules the process generating a studied property. Such an approach provides a stronger basis for demography.Fundación BBVAN