Counting: Numerical Evidence in Anthropology and Other Fields

From the mid-1930s to the early 1990s, major journals in sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, political science, geography, and sociology all saw increases in the proportion of articles with tables or figures analyzing empirical data. This growth in numerical evidence might be attributed in part to efforts by many scholars to make their disciplines less descriptive and more of a social science. In all these fields, some researchers resisted, contending that qualitative approaches offer insights other than those offered by methods they regarded as overly positivist. The journals in these disciplines have followed divergent paths over time in the proportion of articles with quantitative analyses. This proportion has dropped sharply in sociocultural anthropology, but has remained high in archaeology, political science, geography, and sociology. These differences might suggest that most sociocultural anthropologists nowadays, in contrast to the majority of their counterparts in allied fields, do not regard themselves as social scientists.