Linking Individuals and Societies

Guillermina Jasso

No 4288, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science ? population and variable. Starting with the simplest case of one population and one variable, we systematically introduce additional variables and additional populations. This approach enables simple and natural introduction and exposition of such operations as pooling, matching, regression, hierarchical and multilevel modeling, calculating summary measures, finding the distribution of a function of random variables, and choosing between two or more distributions. To illustrate the procedures we draw on problems from a variety of topical domains in social science, including an extended illustration focused on residential racial segregation. Three useful features of the framework are: First, similarities in the mathematical structure underlying distinct substantive questions, spanning different levels of aggregation and different substantive domains, become apparent. Second, links between distinct methodological procedures and operations become apparent. Third, the framework has a potential for growth, as new models and operations become incorporated into the framework.

Keywords: identity; happiness; probability distributions; personal quantitative characteristics; personal qualitative characteristics; lognormal distribution; Pareto distribution; status; power; justice; comparison; micro-macro link; deductive theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C02 C16 D31 D6 D7 D8 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 2010, 34 (1), 1-51

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4288.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4288

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().