Statistical thinking in Norway in the nineteenth century

Lie, Einar

doi:10.1080/03585522.2001.10419838

Cited by 3 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Jeg skal gå inn i dette via en omvei: Utvalgsmetoder, der man i stedet for å drive kartlegging gjennom fullstendige tellinger henter ut opplysninger fra bestemte deler av populasjonen, ble tidlig utviklet i Statistisk sentralbyrå, av personer som arbeidet med direkte inspirasjon fra og beundring for Sundt (Lie 2001(Lie , 2002. Norske statistikere var de første som lanserte slike metoder på internasjonale statistikk-kongresser.…”

Section: å Gjøre Utvalgunclassified

Eilert Sundt som statistiker

Lie¹

2018

TfS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: å Gjøre Utvalgunclassified

Eilert Sundt som statistiker

Lie¹

2018

TfS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The questionnaire included 223 questions on the social and political situation of the working class (Guerena, ). In Norway, a number of primarily local studies where questionnaires were distributed by civil servants were carried out in the last decades of nineteenth century (Lie, ).…”

Section: The Sample Survey As a Social Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the context of late nineteenth century social science, individualism meant the abandonment of the holistic or collectivistic perception of society where economic and political duties and rights are determined by the individual's place in social groups, classes, or estates in favor of seeing society as individualistic. Gradually, the individual became the obvious ontological unit (Lie, ; Desrosières & Naish, ). The change may be seen in an indirect way from a speech by the influential English Christian socialist J. M. Ludlow in 1862.…”

Section: Goals and Worldview: The Social Question And The Need For Rementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The fact that contemporary survey practices have similarities with the attempts in 1890 to construct a sample survey does not means that the development from the early research activity to the present techniques may be seen as a linear process (Lie, ; Savage, ). Rather, the analysis shows that researchers who wanted to do a sample survey had to use several techniques that are also used in contemporary research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Bringing Things Together: Developing the Sample Survey as Practice in the Late Nineteenth Century

Gundelach¹

2016

J History Behavioral Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The first sample surveys in the latter parts of the 19th century were an intellectual social movement. They were motivated by the intention to improve the economic and political conditions of workers. The quantitative survey was considered an ideal because it would present data about the workers as facts, i.e. establish a scientific authoritative truth. In a case study from Denmark, the paper shows how the first survey - a study of seamstresses - was carried out by bringing several cognitive and organizational elements together: a network of researchers, a method for sampling, the construction of a questionnaire, a procedure for coding, and analyzing the data. It was a trial and error process where the researchers lacked relevant concepts and methods but relied on their intuition and on inspiration from abroad.

show abstract

“…The most recent are clearly inspired by Adolphe Quetelet. His causal relationships and constants were also geographically distinct and temporally specific (Lie 2001). Seip has demonstrated how Sundt followed the Belgian statistician virtually verbatim in some of his descriptions of social regularities (Seip 1983).…”

Section: Background: Statistics In Norway Before 1870mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise and Fall of Sampling Surveys in Norway, 18751906

Lie

2002

Science in Context

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ArgumentNorwegian statisticians were pioneers in the development of sampling techniques for social and economic investigations in the late nineteenth century. After a few years of extensive use of sampling surveys in large-scale social and economic investigations, the method fell out of use in the early 1900s. This article supports Alain Desrosières’ argument that the emergence of sampling procedures in social investigations must be seen in relation to a modern “individualistic” view of society. But the importance of the institutional setting is also stressed: The way statistical research was connected to the power and resources of the State within the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) was a central element in the development and implementation of the new technique. A separate argument is presented to explain why the method suddenly lost ground in Norway and the general director of the CBS stopped promoting his method in the meetings of the International Statistical Institute. The explanation is probably to be found in a large and politically important survey in the 1890s that was attacked by a group of actuaries from private insurance firms. The heated and long-lasting debate turned into a question about trust in the new method and the reputation of the head of CBS as a statistical expert. The necessary trust and confidence was lost when the CBS in 1906 had to admit that important estimates from this survey obviously were erroneous.

show abstract

Statistical thinking in Norway in the nineteenth century

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Eilert Sundt som statistiker

Eilert Sundt som statistiker

Bringing Things Together: Developing the Sample Survey as Practice in the Late Nineteenth Century

The Rise and Fall of Sampling Surveys in Norway, 18751906

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About