Abstract
The history of content in social science is the history of fad, fashion, and momentary preoccupations, but the history of research methods is one of cumulative developments which have enabled us to ask increasingly precise and sophisticated questions about human behavior. In this sense, I believe progress in social science is mostly in the ability to ask questions, not in the ability to foresee the answers. (Davis 1964)
This volume of Sociological Methodology is dedicated to James Allan Davis, who died in Michigan City, Indiana, on September 29, 2016. 1 A colleague of far-reaching accomplishments, Jim Davis originated the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative study of the U.S. adult population conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) since 1972, and was a cofounder of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), a set of replicated social surveys across several nations. There are hardly any sociologists worldwide who have not heard of the American GSS surveys, the ISSP surveys, and similar GSS-inspired replicated surveys—from the German ALLBUS to EU social surveys, among many others. Davis was a pioneer in conducting surveys across time and across nations and making data resources in the social sciences publicly accessible. When I entered graduate school in sociology in the mid-1960s, it soon became clear that unless one were a theorist, for purposes of writing master’s and doctoral theses, one either collected one’s own data or hitched oneself to a faculty member who had data. There was very little access to national-level, publicly available data. Jim Davis and others changed all that. Students now have access to a wide range of social science data. Davis was a leader in advocating for wide and timely dissemination of social science data, insisting that the GSS be made available immediately to scholars, policy makers, and students.
Many people of my generation have had the special privilege of knowing Jim and appreciating his unique contributions, not only as the “master of social surveys” but also as a sociologist, methodologist, mentor, and friend. He brought me into his orbit in the 1970s when the GSS was getting off the ground. He and Tom W. Smith invited me to participate in the first GSS “methodological advisory committee” (Norman Bradburn, Howard Schuman, and Seymour Sudman were the other committee members). Then, when the National Science Foundation insisted that the GSS have a Board of Overseers, I was asked to be a member of the first such entity (which was chaired by Peter Rossi). I served two 3-year terms as a member and then succeeded Rossi as chair of the board for two more terms. I consider myself to be a member of the first generation of GSS scholars and also consider myself very fortunate to have known and been mentored by Jim Davis. By dedicating this volume to him, I wanted to share some of my memories of Jim’s life as a sociologist with others who may not have had the good fortune of knowing him or his work.
Born in Chicago in 1929, Jim Davis became a distinguished American sociologist, with biographical and intellectual roots in the Midwest. Jim received a baccalaureate degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1950 and an MS in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1952. He received his PhD in sociology in 1955 from Harvard. His contacts there included Samuel Stouffer and others, who were influential in the development of his substantive work. He held many prestigious positions over the course of his career. At the time he passed away, Jim held the titles of emeritus professor of sociology at Harvard and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. He was also affiliated with the NORC at the University of Chicago, an organization with which he had close ties (including serving as a former director) throughout his entire professional life. Over his career, he held teaching positions at Yale, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and ultimately Harvard. He chaired the sociology department at Harvard in the 1980s, and he and his wife, Martha, served as Masters of Winthrop House on the Harvard campus in Cambridge. After they retired from Harvard, they returned to the Midwest, living in Chicago and up the coast of Lake Michigan in Lakeside, Michigan. After retirement, Jim continued to toil in the fields of rich survey data he had helped cultivate, and his work continued to yield bountiful social science knowledge and questions.
An imaginative teacher of undergraduates, Davis was one who early recognized the potential classroom uses of computers, and he was an early promoter of what is now called “active learning.” Known as a clever and witty classroom teacher, he conducted his classes as laboratories in which students developed and then tested hypotheses in real time using data from the GSS and other surveys. Beginning in the 1970s, he also single-handedly developed software for the in-class analysis of survey data. Many people have tried to model themselves after his approach to teaching about using surveys to understand the society in which we live. His course “American Society” was a perennial favorite among Harvard undergraduates.
As already noted, Jim is probably best known for his development of the General Social Survey, conducted through the survey facilities of the NORC, affiliated with the University of Chicago. NORC played an important role in Jim Davis’s career. He began his association with NORC in 1957, soon after completing his PhD and after a few years of teaching at Yale and Johns Hopkins. At NORC, he took a job with Peter Rossi but ended up working on a different project, becoming the senior study director for “the Great Books study,” a NORC project aimed at investigating the impact of small discussion groups for the Great Books Society (see Davis 1964).
Among Jim’s early interests was what became known as “contextual effects,” and his early path-breaking works included his examination of context effects in education. One of his most famous essays, “The Campus as a Frog Pond” (Davis 1966), helped establish an entire subfield of educational sociology, one in search of the presence of school effects in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools and the nature of those effects. His thesis in that essay was that career decisions of male college students were shaped by “relative deprivation”—that is, their relative standing vis-à-vis peers. Relative deprivation was the term given to the phenomenon by Samuel Stouffer, who Davis had worked with at Harvard. Jim’s hypothesis was that recent college graduates were influenced (albeit in a negative way) by the academic caliber of the student body in making career decisions as much as they were by their own scholastic aptitude. He interpreted his findings to suggest the tendency for individuals to evaluate their academic ability in reference to their peers on the same campus rather than just their own abilities. Students of equal ability at different places—the small frog in a big pond versus the big frog in the small pond—would make different career choices. These findings have been replicated over and over in subsequent research.
Jim Davis was a multifaceted sociologist, with many interests and preoccupations in addition to a full menu of research, writing, and teaching. After establishing a career in academic sociology, he became the director of NORC in 1971, serving in this role until 1975. During his tenure as the head of NORC, he founded the National Data Program for the Social Sciences, which has conducted the GSS since 1972. The GSS project, which tracks trends in social and political attitudes and beliefs of American adults over time, is undoubtedly Jim’s most enduring impact on the social sciences, but he was also a premier sociological methodologist. He wrote books and articles on survey data analysis, causal inference in survey data, and related topics. What come to mind are his 1970s papers in SM, an exegesis on the application of linear flow graphs to contingency tables (Davis 1975) and on Goodman’s work about contingency table analysis via log-linear models (Davis 1974a).
Not only did Jim Davis develop an orientation to survey methods as an important part of the sociological arsenal, he encouraged others to develop innovative survey measures, and the GSS was the testbed for many new ideas. The 1985 GSS was one of the first attempts to measure social networks in a survey questionnaire (Burt 1985; Marsden 1987). The networks module has been replicated two additional times, in 1987 and 2004, and these measures have been a focus of much research (e.g., Fischer 2009; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006, 2009). Jim encouraged the use of the GSS for such experimentation to better map the socio-environmental factors that are related to attitudes and beliefs. Another example of his effort to encourage new developments was the replication of prestige ratings of U.S. occupations undertaken by the 1989 GSS. This work was instrumental in providing an update on earlier NORC prestige scores for occupations (see Nakao and Treas 1994). The 1989 GSS update of prior NORC prestige scores further provided a basis for useful comparisons of prestige ratings with socioeconomic data from the 1990 census (Hauser and Warren 1997). 2 Jim was always willing to encourage the development of new ideas that could be included in the GSS, with the hope of finding out more about the quality of the GSS data and ways in which it could be improved, all of which would have the additional benefit of improving knowledge in substantive and methodological areas. In this regard, Jim stimulated my own methodological work on the measurement of attitudes and beliefs in surveys—the 1980 GSS methodological experiment on the comparison of ratings and rankings in the measurement of desirable child qualities (see Alwin and Krosnick 1985; Krosnick and Alwin 1987a, 1987b, 1988) and our early work on satisficing in surveys (Krosnick and Alwin 1988). There are numerous other examples. Without the stimulation and encouragement of Jim Davis, there is much methodological experimentation that would not have been done in the GSS. In my most recent correspondence from Jim, he encouraged me to continue my work on the reliability of survey data (e.g., Alwin 2007).
Davis’s own GSS-based studies documented steady trends toward greater tolerance and liberal attitudes, much of this a result of the gradual replacement of more conservative earlier-born cohorts by more liberal later-born ones (e.g., see Davis 1974b, 1992, 2004). He argued there were conservative trends within cohorts between the later 1970s and liberal rebound in the 1980s, suggesting period influences on attitudes and beliefs. In contrast, the effects of cohort replacement reflected in between-cohort differences that were witness to the cumulative liberalizing effects produced by cohort succession. Jim was an advocate of studying social trends in attitudes and beliefs within a framework that incorporated components of cohort replacement and intracohort shifts. He claimed that cohort replacement produced the greatest rate of change in the GSS surveys, and given the clear ways in which Jim stated the problem, future scholars would be able to document the trends and their sources (e.g., Firebaugh 1989).
As mentioned earlier, Jim Davis was a modern-day pioneer in social science survey research. Along with Tom W. Smith and others, he cofounded the International Social Survey Program in 1984 together with teams from Great Britain, West Germany, and Australia, a program that has grown exponentially and that now conducts comparative survey research across literally dozens of countries. Davis was recognized with many professional honors, such as the Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research from the Roper Center (2010), the Warren E. Miller Award for Meritorious Services to the Social Sciences from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (1997), the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from Harvard (1997), the American Association for Public Opinion Research Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement (1992), and the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award from the American Sociological Association (1989).
His legacy is expressed not only in the tangible features of the GSS, the ISSP, and his scholarly writings but in the countless individuals who worked with him, learned from him, and got to know him. I consider myself someone who was profoundly affected by Jim Davis, and I am grateful for his influence in my life. In statistics and in life, Jim followed the least-squares principle. To wit, Jim navigated the professional academic world with an inclusive, good-natured, and friendly style, having a positive influence on those around him. He was a person who in his life “minimized the mean-squared misery” (to borrow a phrase from my old friend and former editor of SM, Karl Schuessler). In other words, Jim made life better for all of us.