The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: VPugazhenthi Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_Q Date:31/
3/09 Time:19:14:08 Filepath:H:/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-9781405132879/appln/
3B2/revises/9781405132879_4_Q.3d

much work on happiness shows that – to the

extent that it can be measured – it does not

increase above a certain threshold income:

people may be more content and live more

comfortable lives with higher incomes,

but they do not feel any happier (Layard,

2005). rj

quango An acronym for quasi-autono-

mous-non-governmentalorganizations. These

are established and financed by governments

to perform public functions in areas of policy

such as education and health care. Quango

members are appointed rather than elected,

and are drawn from private, public and third

sectors. Since the 1970s, quangos have grown

both numerically and in terms of the areas of

the world in which they can be found. This

growth reflects a general trend in national gov-

ernments changing how they govern, involving

new forms of organizations in their activities.

The incorporation of these organizations into

thestate apparatusraises issues of account-

ability,democracyand transparency in public

decision-making. kwa

Suggested reading

Ridley and Wilson (1995).

quantitative methods Mathematics has al-

ways been a foundation of geographical prac-

tices. For many centuries, it underpinned the

development ofcartography, providing the

techniques (notably geometrical and trigono-

metrical) deployed inmap-making – in estab-

lishing exact locations (increasingly through

the universally adopted graticule of latitude

and longitude and the national surveying sys-

tems based on that matrix) and in portraying

those locations in map form. With the latter,

for example, much effort was (and still is)

expended on the development ofmap projec-

tionswith which to portray a spherical reality

on to a two-dimensional surface. Increasingly,

however, this work has been separated from

academic geographical practices into separate

disciplines (such as geodesy).

Although, as with almost all changes within

a discipline, earlier exemplars can be identi-

fied, the post-1945 decades saw a major shift

in geographical practices associated with a

widespread adoption of quantitative methods

inhumanandphysical geography– a period

widely known as the discipline’squantitative

revolution and very much linked to the

adoption of an explicitly theoretical approach

to the discipline’s subject matter. This shift

was associated with scholars located at a

number of institutions, initially in the USA

and then also in the UK (Johnston and Sid-

away, 2004a), but the dominant core was lo-

cated at the Department of Geography in the

University of Washington, Seattle, in the early

to mid-1950s, when a number of graduate

students coalesced around two individuals –

Edward Ullman and, especially, William Gar-

rison. Their core concern was the application

and development oflocation theory(espe-

cially that based inneo-classical econom-

ics), with quantitative methods identified –

as in other social sciences, notably economics

and sociology at the time – as a means of both

expressing theories in a formal language and

empirically testinghypotheses.

These two core activities drew on different

quantitativemethodologies: the expression

oftheoriesinvolved mathematical argumen-

tation and representation (includingmodel-

ling), whereas hypothesis-testing used

statistical procedures, expressing the outcome

of empirical research in probabilistic terms. In

some cases, mathematical modelling preceded

empirical work, providing the formal basis for

hypothesis generation; in others, statistical an-

alysis was either based on more informal forms

of argument leading to some form of expected

empirical outcome, or involved exploration of

numerical data without any clear expectation

as to the likely outcome (cf.exploratory

data analysis). These two approaches (espe-

cially that involving statistical analysis) spread

rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s from the

core institutions in Seattle and other US

centres, alongside parallel and linked develop-

ments in the UK (Barnes, 2004b, 2008b;

Johnston,Fairbrother,Hoare,Hayesand

Jones, 2008): according to Burton (1963),

geography’s ‘quantitative revolution’ had suc-

ceeded by the early 1960s, although circum-

stantial evidence suggested that it never

dominated human geography (Wheeler, 2002).

Much of the mathematical modelling

underpinning quantitative work in human

geography has focused on either spatial pat-

terns – such as the distribution of settlements,

as incentral place theory–orspatial

interaction(notably various forms ofmigra-

tionand communication). The goal was to

express the subject matter under consideration

in mathematical terms. At the core of much

work on spatial interaction, for example, was

an analogy with Newton’s famous formula-

tion, which posited that the volume of inter-

action between two places was positively

related to some index of the generating cap-

acity at each place and negatively related to the

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_Q Final Proof page 607 31.3.2009 7:14pm Compositor Name: ARaju

QUANTITATIVE METHODS