Rejoinder: Positivism and Big-game Fishing :a reply to comments

Nicolas Robette (1) , Xavier Bry (2) , Eva Lelièvre (3)

1 PRINTEMPS - Professions, institutions, temporalités
2 UM - Université de Montpellier
3 INED - Institut national d'études démographiques

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. " (Tukey 1962) The publication of our article in Sociological Methodology was the successful conclusion of a long " sequence " involving one journal's refusal to referee it (for not being in their field), a presentation at the RC33 conference of the ISA in 2012, and submission to SM followed by six rounds of revisions—a record both for that journal and for us. The symposium concerning the article has thus gone much further than we would have hoped when we started the work in 2009. Indeed, we are grateful for the opportunity we have thus had to exchange with specialists in sequence analysis (and life course analysis) and in this way construct a necessarily partial and temporary situation report on the progress made by this family of techniques. We do not have the space in this rejoinder to discuss all the criticisms and observations we have received. However, certain patterns have emerged and we shall try to address the most " robust ". First, we must point out and rectify a few misunderstandings. It all depends The first misunderstanding concerns the contrast between local and global interdependence, which we explain in the first part of the article. This contrast as we see it is a " conceptual " one, in the sense that it concerns the way the interdependence between the dimensions of the sequences is " grasped " and recorded by statistical techniques. It therefore precedes the chain of analysis. For example, in order to study the life courses of two spouses after they formed a couple it is appropriate to consider these life courses as being simultaneous (because they develop jointly within each couple) and to compare the couples from point to point. This is a case of local interdependence and MCSA is particularly appropriate. One of us has indeed used MCSA in exactly this sort of case (Pailhé et al. 2013). But if we now turn to the study of homogamy on the basis of the two spouses' past life courses leading to their forming a couple, their alignment from point to point makes little sense and this is a case of global interdependence, to be analyzed with GIMSA. Fasang, in her commentary, appears to understand this distinction between local and global interdependence in a different sense, concerning the interpretation of results, i.e. subsequent to the analysis chain: are the dimensions of the sequences substantively linked in a general manner or at certain specific points in their development? This recalls the event/sequence dichotomy or, in Billari's terms, that between the atomistic and the holistic approach (Billari 2001). Under our definition of the distinction between local and global interdependence, the comparison between MCSA and GIMSA is less relevant, since the two techniques do not address the same problem. Which is why in the article we compare GIMSA and Strategy 4,

Domaines: Sociologie

Nicolas Robette, Xavier Bry, Eva Lelièvre. Rejoinder: Positivism and Big-game Fishing :a reply to comments. Sociological Methodology, 2015, 45 (1), pp.88 - 100. ⟨10.1177/0081175015587511⟩. ⟨halshs-01760986⟩