Q

Quantitative Revolution

A shift in the methodological foundation of the social sciences and some human-

ities toward more “scientific” techniques and models, based on the increased use

of statistical methods, a search for empirical, natural “laws,” the widespread devel-

opment and application of hypothetical models and theory, and the adoption of a

positivist-based emphasis on scholarship grounded in the “scientific method.” In

American geography, this “revolution” was initiated in the late 1950s by a group

of emerging scholars who incorporated analytical techniques into their work that

relied heavily on mathematical proofs and who wished to push the discipline in

the direction of what some termed “spatial science.” Many of those who consid-

ered themselves “quantifiers” felt that the discipline of geography had stagnated,

remaining essentially devoid of a body of general theory that had emerged in other

social sciences in the early 20th century, was overly dependent on simple descrip-

tive narratives that offered little more than (in their opinion, at least) superficial

accounts of topographical and cultural features encountered on the landscape,

and provided little in the way of application to other fields of inquiry, or even other

closely related social sciences. It should be pointed out that in fact mathematical

modeling and sophisticated, abstract theoretical approaches were not unknown in

geographical thinking at all, as witnessed by the promulgation of thevon Thunen

modelin economic geography in the early 1800s, Walther Christaller’s work on

urban hierarchy presented inCentral Place Theory,aswellastheresearchof

many other urban geographers in the first decades of the 20th century, along with

other examples. But much of this tradition lay in European geography, while such

methodologies were more rarely encountered in geographical research in the

United States.

At the time the quantitative revolution began to influence geography, the disci-

pline in the United States was experiencing something of an identity crisis.

Related subjects like geology, political science, and even anthropology and sociol-

ogy were firmly rooted and defined as academic disciplines, but geography had

only emerged as a separate subject at the university level in many cases in the early

20th century. The first academic department of geography in the United States was

founded at the University of Chicago in 1903. Ironically, the integrative nature of

the discipline actually worked to undermine its status as a distinctive intellectual

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