21.   Variable analysis is the closest that social research has come to a generic method of social investigation.

22.   Here we have, in fact, a developed form of the variable analysis discussed in the last chapter.

23.   Another, more prolonged and more significant, concerned the very foundations of variable analysis, and by implication the explanatory survey, namely its empiricist inspiration.

24.   This cannot be assumed so easily in variable analysis.

25.   Third, we shall address some of the problems associated with interviewing and the use of questionnaires in the context of variable analysis.