Multilevel Synthesis

This book aims to show how the multilevel approach successfully overcomes the divisions that emerged during the rise of the social sciences― specifically, here, demography and statistics―from the seventeenth century to the present. We begin by examining how the approach connects different branches of the social sciences that conducted their observation and analysis at different levels or addressed different aspects of human complexity. Next, we describe in greater detail the statistical methods and techniques that it can use to simultaneously identify and measure the effects of the different levels examined on the characteristics studied. To introduce this work, we first provide an overview of the goal of social sciences, before discussing the various levels of aggregation at which they can operate. Social sciences start from the observation of a real-life experience and then seek to structure it according to different fields, which constitute the specific objects of study for each science. As a rule, these objects are defined independently of the scale and levels of aggregation that can be chosen to observe them. For example, the object of demography is the quantitative study of human populations, their variations, and their status, without specifying whether the level chosen is the individual, the family, the population of a town, or that of a country. Likewise, economics studies the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth, without specifying if the analysis is of an individual, a market, a firm or a nation.

This book presents a historical panorama of the evolution of demographic thought from its eighteenth-century origins up to the present day, and uses it to demonstrate how the multilevel approach can resolve some of the contradictions that have become apparent and achieve a synthesis of the different approaches employed. Part one guides the reader from period analysis to multilevel analysis, examining longitudinal and event history analysis on the way. Part two is a detailed account of multilevel analysis, its methods, and the relevant mathematical models notably as regards the type of variables being used. Numerous examples, examined across successive sections, make the book clear and easy to follow.

The theoretical and epistemological treatment of these problems, during which the foundations of sociology and demography are revisited, and the logical development that leads to the most recent approaches, are handled sufficiently rigorously to satisfy social science specialists while remaining accessible for readers new to the field. The whole adds up to a comprehensive account of progress in sociological and demographic savoir-faire, as well as being both a textbook and an assessment of the multilevel analysis that tackles one of the major problems of empirical sociology: that of integrating analysis at the individual and group levels.