Jeff Evans mentioned Q Step in his recent email re possible books / publications from Radstats. I have serious issues with the rationale behind Q Step although I accept that some local centres are doing decent things. For a context on this I recommend Brian
Castellani's piece in Society Today - see:
http://www.discoversociety.org/2014/11/04/focus-complexity-and-the-failure-of-quantitative-social-science/
Bluntly put the conventional quantitative programme across the social sciences has, as the Gulbenkian Commission on the Future of the Social Sciences noted in 1996, very largely failed. This is not an attack on statistics as numbers - vital for social description,
nor on the sensible and limited use of exploratory approaches but on the dominance of conventional linear methods and the belief that the social sciences have to be capable of mathematical formalism to be proper sciences. So Q Step comes along and says we
solve this by training undergraduates in more formal mathematics and 'advanced' statistical methods. The cruder exponents of this position, not I think to be found among the Radstats membership, refer to the great success of the quantitative programme in Economics
to encourage this trend!!
On the whole Radstats has not had a lot to say about methods although there was some decent discussion in Demystifying Social Statistics. I am struck by how there is not so much a debate about these issues as an absence of one. For example I think that a lot
of what is done at the Cathie Marsh Centre in Manchester is done ignoring the points Marsh herself made in her wonderful book on Surveys in Social Research.
We would all agree that innumeracy is not a valid epistemological position otherwise we would not be in Radstats but there is a politics of methods as well as a politics of numbers. The politics of methods is first an internal politics of the Academy but it
has implications which go beyond it. I think the politics of numbers matters a lot more since most of the numbers are based on nothing more complicated than counting and that is crucial but the politics of methods matters as well.
David Byrne