11.   Sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists and economists began to use and develop variable analysis in a series of what became classic studies.

12.   Symbolic interactionists were trenchant in their attack on variable analysis largely because of its failure to provide a sense of the processual and negotiated character of social life.

13.   For now we wish to go into some detail on one of the major planks of variable analysis, namely measurement.

14.   Our more immediate concern in this section is with measurement as understood within variable analysis.

15.   Variable analysis stipulates that the phenomena of social research be reflected in objective, observable indicators which stand for the phenomenon.

16.   Measurement is, in many ways, the point of variable analysis and is its inferential backbone.

17.   None the less, for the inferential structure of variable analysis some level of quantification is required.

18.   It should be no surprise that both variable analysis as a mode of sociological thinking and the use of scaling in research have been criticised.

19.   Variable analysis is an inferential structure, a form of methodological reasoning, that has come to dominate social research.

20.   One important feature of variable analysis, and for many its primary virtue, is that, as a method, it is theoretically neutral.