Quantitative Revolution - Synopsis and Background

Synopsis and Background

Many geography departments in the 1950s had recently separated from geology departments in the flux of postwar (World War II) enrollment. Because geologists of the time looked at geography as soft and unscientific, the feeling of many geographers was to persuade critics that geographers were not second-rate geologists. The changes during the 1950s through 1970s were not the introduction of mathematics into geography, but mathematics as a tool for explicit purposes and for statistical methodology and formal mathematical modeling.

In the early 1950s, there was a growing sense that the existing paradigm for geographical research was not adequate in explaining how physical, economic, social, and political processes are spatially organized, ecologically related, or how outcomes generated by them are evidence for a given time and place. A more abstract, theoretical approach to geographical research has emerged, evolving the analytical method of inquiry.

The analytical method of inquiry led to the development of generalizations that are logically valid about the spatial aspects of a small set of closely defined events embodied in a wide range of natural and cultural settings. Generalizations may take the form of tested hypotheses, models, or theories, and the research is judged on its scientific fit and its validity. Adoption of the analytical approach had helped geography become a more law-giving science, and the conception of the discipline as an idiographic field of study has become less acceptable starting in the 1980s.