Statistics as Legal E
idence
ensure that his results are not overvalued. Terms such
as ‘statistical significance’ are easily and frequently
misunderstood to imply a finding of practical signifi-
cance; levels of significance are all too often interpreted
as posterior probabilities, for example, in the guise
that, if a DNA profile occurs only 1 in 10,000 times,
then the chances are 9,999 to 1 that an individual
having a matching profile is the source of the profile.
As a result, individuals may tend to focus on the
quantitative elements of a case, thereby overlooking
qualitative elements that may in fact be more germane
or relevant.
9. Other Applications
The last decades of the twentieth century saw a
remarkable variety of legal applications of statistics:
attempting to determine the possible deterrent effects
of capital punishment, estimating damages in antitrust
litigation, epidemiological questions of the type raised
in the book and movie A Ci
il Action. Some of the
books listed in the bibliography discuss a number of
these.
See also: Juries; Legal Reasoning and Argumentation;
Legal Reasoning Models; Linear Hypothesis: Fal-
lacies and Interpretive Problems (Simpson’s Paradox);
Sample Surveys: The Field
Bibliography
Bickel P, Hammel E, O’Connell J W 1975 Is there a sex bias in
graduate admissions? Data from Berkeley. Science 187:
398–404. Reprinted In: Fairley W B, Mosteller F (eds.)
Statistics and Public Policy. Addison-Wesley, New York,
pp. 113–30
Chaikan J, Chaikan M, Rhodes W 1994 Predicting Violent
Behavior and Classifying Violent Offenders. In: Understanding
and Pre
enting Violence, Volume 4: Consequences and Control.
National Academy Press, Washington, DC, pp. 217–95
DeGroot M H, Fienberg S E, Kadane J B 1987 Statistics and the
Law. Wiley, New York
Evett I W, Weir B S 1998 Interpreting DNA E
idence: Statistical
Genetics for Forensic Scientists
Federal Judicial Center 1994 Reference Manual on Scientific
E
idence. McGraw Hill
Fienberg S E 1971 Randomization and social affairs: The 1970
draft lottery. Science 171: 255–61
Fienberg S E (ed.) 1989 The E
ol
ing Role of Statistical
Assessments as E
idence in the Courts. Springer-Verlag, New
York
Finkelstein M O, Levin B 1990 Statistics for Lawyers. Springer-
Verlag, New York
Gastwirth J L 1988 Statistical Reasoning in Law and Public
Policy, Vol. 1: Statistical Modeling and Decision Science; Vol.
2: Tort Law, E
idence and Health. Academic Press, Boston
Gastwirth J L 2000 Statistical Science in the Courtroom.
Springer-Verlag, New York
15080
Harr J 1996 A Ci
il Action. Vintage Books, New York
Lagakos S W, Wessen B J, Zelen M 1986 An analysis of
contaminated well water and health effects in Woburn,
Massachusetts. Journal of the American Statistical Association
81: 583–96
Meier P, Zabell S 1980 Benjamin Peirce and the Howland Will.
Journal of the American Statistical Association 75: 497–506
Tribe L H 1971 Trial by mathematics. Har
ard Law Re
iew 84:
1329–48
Zeisel H, Kaye D H 1997 Pro
e It With Figures: Empirical
Methods in Law and Litigation. Springer-Verlag, New York
S. L. Zabell
Statistics, History of
The word ‘statistics’ today has several different mean-
ings. For the public, and even for many people
specializing in social studies, it designates numbers
and measurements relating to the social world: popu-
lation, gross national product, and unemployment, for
instance. For academics in ‘Statistics Departments,’
however, it designates a branch of applied math-
ematics making it possible to build models in any area
featuring large numbers, not necessarily dealing with
society. History alone can explain this dual meaning.
Statistics appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth
century as meaning a ‘quantified description of
human–community characteristics.’ It brought to-
gether two previous traditions: that of German
‘Statistik’ and that of English political arithmetic
(Lazarsfeld 1977).
When it originated in Germany in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, the Statistik of
Hermann Conring (1606–81) and Gottfried Achenwall
(1719–79) was a means for classifying the knowledge
needed by kings. This ‘science of the state’ included
history, law, political science, economics, and geog-
raphy, that is, a major part of what later became the
subjects of ‘social studies,’ but presented from the
point of view of their utility for the state. These various
forms of knowledge did not necessarily entail quan-
titative measurements: they were basically associated
with the description of specific territories in all their
aspects. This territorial connotation of the word
‘statistics’ would subsist for a long time in the
nineteenth century.
Independently of the German Statistik, the English
tradition of political arithmetic had developed methods
for analyzing numbers and calculations, on the basis of
parochial records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths.
Such methods, originally developed by John Graunt
(1620–74) in his work on ‘bills of mortality,’ were then
systematized by William Petty (1627–87). They were
used, among others, to assess the population of a

kingdom and to draw up the first forms of life
insurance. They constitute the origin of modern
demography.
Nineteenth-century ‘statistics’ were therefore a
fairly informal combination of these two traditions:
taxonomy and numbering. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, it further became a mathematical
method for the analysis of facts (social or not)
involving large numbers and for inference on the basis
of such collections of facts. This branch of math-
ematics is generally associated with the probability
theory, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, which, in the nineteenth century, influenced
many branches of both the social and natural sciences
(Gigerenzer et al. 1989). The word ‘statistics’ is still
used in both ways today and both of these uses are still
related, of course, insofar as quantitative social studies
use, in varied proportions, inference tools provided by
mathematical statistics. The probability calculus, on
its part, grounds the credibility of statistical measure-
ments resulting from surveys, together with random
sampling and confidence intervals.
The diversity of meanings of the word ‘statistics,’
maintained until today, has been heightened by the
massive development, beginning in the 1830s, of
bureaus of statistics, administrative institutions dis-
tinct from universities, in charge of collecting, process-
ing, and transmitting quantified information on the
population, the economy, employment, living con-
ditions, etc. Starting in the 1940s, these bureaus of
statistics became important ‘data’ suppliers for em-
pirical social studies, then in full growth. Their history
is therefore an integral part of these sciences, especially
in the second half of the twentieth century, during
which the mathematical methods developed by uni-
versity statisticians were increasingly used by the so-
called ‘official’ statisticians. Consequently the ‘history
of statistics’ is a crossroads history connecting very
different fields, which are covered in other articles of
this encyclopedia: general problems of the ‘quanti-
fication’ of social studies (Theodore Porter), math-
ematical ‘sampling’ methods (Stephen E. Fienberg
and J. M. Tanur), ‘survey research’ (Martin Bulmer),
‘demography’ (Simon Szreter), ‘econometrics,’ etc.
The history of these different fields was the object of
much research in the 1980s and 1990s, some examples
of which are indicated in the Bibliography. Its main
interest is to underscore the increasingly closer conn-
ections between the so-called ‘internal’ dimensions
(history of the technical tools), the ‘external’ ones
(history of the institutions), and those related to the
construction of social studies ‘objects,’ born from the
interaction between the three foci constituted by
university research, administrations in charge of
‘social problems,’ and bureaus of statistics. This ‘co-
construction’ of objects makes it possible to join
historiographies that not long ago were distinct. Three
key moments of this history will be mentioned here:
Adolphe Quetelet and the average man (1830s), Karl
Statistics, History of
Pearson and correlation (1890s), and the establishment
of large systems for the production and processing of
statistics.
1. Quetelet, the A
erage Man, and Moral
Statistics
The cognitive history of statistics can be presented as
that of the tension and sliding between two foci: the
measurement of uncertainty (Stigler 1986), resulting
from the work of eighteenth-century astronomers and
physicists, and the reduction of di
ersity, which will be
taken up by social studies. Statistics is a way of taming
chance (Hacking 1990) in two different ways: chance
and uncertainty related to protocols of observation,
chance and dispersion related to the diversity and the
indetermination of the world itself. The Belgian
astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796–
1874) is the essential character in the transition
between the world of ‘uncertain measurement’ of the
probability proponents (Carl Friedrich Gauss, Pierre
Simone de Laplace) and that of the ‘regularities’
resulting from diversity, thanks to his having tran-
sferred, around 1830, the concept of average from the
natural sciences to the human sciences, through the
construction of a new being, the average man.
As early as the eighteenth century, specificities
appeared from observations in large numbers: drawing
balls out of urns, gambling, successive measurements
of the position of a star, sex ratios (male and female
births), or the mortality resulting from preventive
smallpox inoculation, for instance. The radical inno-
vation of this century was to connect these very
different phenomena thanks to the common perspec-
tive provided by the ‘law of large numbers’ formulated
by Jacques Bernoulli in 1713. If draws from a constant
urn containing white and black balls are repeated a
large number of times, the observed share of white
balls ‘converges’ toward that actually contained by the
urn. Considered by some as a mathematical theorem
and by others as an experimental result, this ‘law’ was
at the crossroads of the two currents in epistemological
science: one ‘hypothetical deductive,’ the other ‘em-
pirical inductive.’
Beginning in the 1830s, the statistical description of
‘observations in large numbers’ became a regular
activity of the state. Previously reserved for princes,
this information henceforth available to ‘enlightened
men’ was related to the population, to births,
marriages, and deaths, to suicides and crimes, to
epidemics, to foreign trade, schools, jails, and hos-
pitals. It was generally a by-product of administration
activity, not the result of special surveys. Only the
population census, the showcase product of nine-
teenth-century statistics, was the object of regular
surveys. These statistics were published in volumes
with heterogeneous contents, but their very existence
15081
Statistics, History of
suggests that the characteristics of society were hence-
forth a matter of scientific law and no longer of judicial
law, that is, of observed regularity and not of the
normative decisions of political power. Quetelet was
the man who orchestrated this new way of thinking the
social world. In the 1830s and 1840s, he set up
administrative and social networks for the production
of statistics and established—until the beginning of
the twentieth century—how statistics were to be
interpreted.
This interpretation is the result of the combination
of two ideas developed from the law of large numbers:
the generality of ‘normal distribution’ (or, in Quetelet’s
vocabulary: the ‘law of possibilities’) and the regularity
of certain yearly statistics. As early as 1738, Abraham
de Moivre, seeking to determine the convergence
conditions for the law of large numbers, had formu-
lated the mathematical expression of the future
‘Gaussian law’ as the limit of a binomial distribution.
Then Laplace (1749–1827) had shown that this law
constituted a good representation of the distribution
of measurement errors in astronomy, hence the name
that Quetelet and his contemporaries also used to
designate it: the law of errors (the expression ‘normal
law,’ under which it is known today, would not be
introduced until the late nineteenth century by Karl
Pearson).
Quetelet’s daring intellectual masterstroke was to
bring together two forms: on the one hand the law of
errors in observation, and on the other, the law of
distribution of certain body measurements of individ-
uals in a population, such as the height of conscripts in
a regiment. The likeness of the ‘Gaussian’ looks of
these two forms of distribution justified the invention
of a new being with a promise of notable posterity in
social studies: the average man. Thus, Quetelet re-
stricted the calculation and the legitimate use of
averages to cases where the distribution of the observa-
tions had a Gaussian shape, analogous to that of the
distribution of the astronomical observations of a star.
Reasoning on that basis, just as previous to this
distribution there was a real star (the ‘cause’ of the
Gaussian-shaped distribution), previous to the equally
Gaussian distribution of the height of conscripts there
was a being of a reality comparable to the existence of
the star. Quetelet’s average man is also the ‘constant
cause,’ previous to the observed controlled variability.
He is a sort of model, of which specific individuals are
imperfect copies.
The second part of this cognitive construction,
which is so important in the ulterior uses of statistics in
social studies, is the attention drawn by the ‘remark-
able regularity’ of series of statistics, such as those of
marriages, suicides, or crimes. Just as series of draws
from an urn reveal a regularity in the observed
frequency of white balls, the regularity in the rates of
suicide or crime can be interpreted as resulting from
series of draws from a population, some of the
members of which are affected with a ‘propensity’ to
15082
suicide or crime. The average man is therefore
endowed not only with physical attributes but also
‘moral’ ones, such as these propensities. Here again,
just as the average heights of conscripts are stable,
whereas individual heights are dispersed, crime or
suicide rates are just as stable, whereas these acts are
eminently individual and unpredictable. This form of
statistics, then called ‘moral,’ signaled the beginning of
sociology, a science of society radically distinct from a
science of the individual, such as psychology (Porter
1986). Quetelet’s reasoning would ground the one
developed by Durkheim in Suicide: A Study in So-
ciology (1897).
This way of using statistical regularity to back the
idea of the existence of a society ruled by specific ‘laws,’
distinct from those governing individual behavior,
dominated nineteenth-century, and, in part, twentieth-
century social studies. Around 1900, however, another
approach appeared, this one centered on two ideas:
the distribution (no longer just the average) of observa-
tions, and the correlation between two or several
variables, observed in individuals (no longer just in
groups, such as territories).
2. Distribution, Correlation, and Causality
This shift of interest from the average individual to the
distributions and hierarchies among individuals, was
connected to the rise, in late-century Victorian
England, of a eugenicist and hereditarian current of
thought inspired from Darwin (MacKenzie 1981). Its
two advocates were Francis Galton (1822–1911), a
cousin of Darwin, and Karl Pearson (1857–1936). In
their attempt to measure biological heredity, which
was central to their political construction, they created
a radically new statistics tool that made it possible to
conceive partial causality. Such causality had been
absent from all previous forms of thought, for which A
either is or is not the cause of B, but cannot be so
somewhat or incompletely. Yet Galton’s research on
heredity led to such a formulation: the parents’ height
‘explains’ the children’s, but does not entirely ‘de-
termine’ it. The taller fathers are, the taller are their
sons on a
erage, but, for a father’s given height, the
sons’ height dispersion is great. This formalization of
heredity led to the two related ideas of regression and
correlation, later to be extensively used in social studies
as symptoms of causality.
Pearson, however, greatly influenced by the anti-
realist philosophy of the physicist Ernst Mach, chal-
lenged the idea of ‘causality,’ which according to him
was ‘metaphysical,’ and stuck to the one of ‘cor-
relation,’ which he described with the help of ‘con-
tingency tables’ (Pearson 1911, Chap. 5). For him,
scientific laws are only summaries, brief descriptions
in mental stenography, abridged formulas, a con-
densation of perception routines for future use and
forecasting. Such formulas are the limits of observa-

tions that never perfectly respect the strict functional
laws. The correlation coefficient makes it possible to
measure the strength of the connection, between zero
(independence) and one (strict dependence). Thus, in
this conception of science associated by Pearson with
the budding field of mathematical statistics, the reality
of things can only be invoked for pragmatic ends and
provided that the ‘perception routines’ are maintained.
Similarly, ‘causality’ can only be insofar as it is a
proven correlation, therefore predictable with a fairly
high probability. Pearson’s pointed formulations
would constitute, in the early twentieth century, one of
the foci of the epistemology of statistics applied to
social studies. Others, in contrast, would seek to give
new meaning to the concepts of reality and causality
by defining them differently. These discussions were
strongly related to the aims of the statistical work,
strained between scientific knowledge and decisions.
Current mathematical statistics proceed from the
works of Karl Pearson and his successors: his son
Egon Pearson (1895–1980), the Polish mathematician
Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981), the statistician pioneering
in agricultural experimentation Ronald Fisher (1890–
1962), and finally the engineer and beer brewer
William Gosset, alias Student (1876–1937). These
developments were the result of an increasingly
thorough integration of so-called ‘inferential’ statistics
into probabilistic models. The interpretation of these
constructions is always stretched between two per-
spectives: the one of science, which aims to prove or
test hypotheses, with truth as its goal, and the one of
action, which aims to make the best decision, with
efficiency as its goal. This tension explains a number of
controversies that opposed the founders of inferential
statistics in the 1930s. In effect, the essential innova-
tions were often directly generated within the frame-
work of research as applied to economic issues, for
instance in the cases of Gosset and Fisher.
Gosset was employed in a brewery. He developed
product quality-control techniques based on a small
number of samples. He needed to appraise the
variances and laws of distribution of parameters
calculated on observations not complying with the
supposed ‘law of large numbers.’ Fisher, who worked
in an agricultural research center, could only carry out
a limited number of controlled tests. He mitigated this
limitation by artificially creating a randomness, itself
controlled, for variables other than those for which he
was trying to measure the effect. This ‘randomization’
technique thus introduced probabilistic chance into
the very heart of the experimental process. Unlike
Karl Pearson, Gosset and Fisher used distinct nota-
tions to designate, on the one hand, the theoretical
parameter of a probability distribution (a mean, a
variance, a correlation) and on the other, the estimate
of this parameter, calculated on the basis of observa-
tions so insufficient in number that it was possible to
disregard the gap between these two values, theoretical
and estimated.
Statistics, History of
This new system of notation marked a decisive
turning point: it enabled an inferential statistics based
on probabilistic models. This form of statistics was
developed in two directions. The estimation of para-
meters, which took into account a set of recorded data,
presupposed that the model was true. The information
produced by the model was combined with the data,
but nothing indicated whether the model and the data
were in agreement. In contrast, the hypothesis tests
allowed this agreement to be tested and if necessary to
modify the model: this was the inventive part of
inferential statistics. In wondering whether a set of
events could plausibly have occurred if a model were
true, one compared these events—explicitly or other-
wise—to those that would have occurred if the model
were true, and made a judgment about the gap between
these two sets of events.
This judgment could itself be made according to two
different perspectives, which were the object of vivid
controversy between Fisher on the one hand, and
Neyman and Egon Pearson on the other. Fisher’s test
was placed in a perspective of truth and science: a
theoretical hypothesis was judged plausible or was
rejected, after consideration of the observed data.
Neyman and Pearson’s test, in contrast, was aimed at
decision making and action. One evaluated the re-
spective costs of accepting a false hypothesis and of
rejecting a true one, described as errors of Type I and
II. These two different aims—truth and economy—
although supported by close probabilistic formalism,
led to practically incommensurable argumentative
worlds, as was shown by the dialogue of the deaf
between Fisher on one side, and Neyman and Pearson
on the other (Gigerenzer et al. 1989, pp. 90–109).
3. Official Statistics and the Construction of the
State
At the same time as mathematical statistics were
developing, so-called ‘official’ statistics were also being
developed in ‘bureaus of statistics,’ for a long time on
an independent course. These latter did not use the
new mathematical tools until the 1930s in the United
States and the 1950s in Europe, in particular when the
random sample-survey method was used to study
employment or household budgets. Yet in the 1840s,
Quetelet had already actively pushed for such bureaus
to be set up in different countries, and for their
‘scientification’ with the tools of the time. In 1853, he
had begun organizing meetings of the ‘International
Congress of Statistics,’ which led to the establishment
in 1885 of the ‘International Statistical Institute’
(which still exists and includes mathematicians and
official statisticians). One could write the history of
these bureaus as an aspect of the more general history
of the construction of the state, insofar as they
developed and legitimized a common language specifi-
cally combining the authority of science and that of
15083
Statistics, History of
the state (Anderson 1988, Desrosie' res 1998, Patriarca
1996).
More precisely, every period of the history of a state
could be characterized by the list of ‘socially judged
social’ questions that were consequently put on the
agenda of official statistics. So were co-constructed
three interdependent foci: representation, action, and
statistics—a way of describing and interpreting social
phenomena (to which social studies would increasingly
contribute), a method for determining state inter-
vention and public action, and finally, a list of
statistical ‘variables’ and procedures aimed at measur-
ing them.
Thus for example in England in the second third of
the nineteenth century, poverty, mortality, and epi-
demic morbidity were followed closely in terms of a
detailed geographical distribution (counties) by the
General Register Office (GRO), set up by William
Farr in 1837. England’s economic liberalism and the
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (which led to the
creation of workhouses) were consistent with this
form of statistics. In the 1880s and 1890s, Galton and
Pearson’s hereditarian eugenics would compete with
this ‘environmentalism,’ which explained poverty in
terms of the social and territorial contexts. This new
‘social philosophy’ was reflected in news forms of
political action, and of statistics. Thus the ‘social
classification’ in five differentiated groups used by
British statisticians throughout the twentieth century
is marked by the political and cognitive configuration
of the beginning of the century (Szreter 1996).
In all the important countries (including Great
Britain) of the 1890s and 1900s, however, the work of
the bureaus of statistics was guided by labor-related
issues: employment, wages, workers’ budgets, sub-
sistence costs, etc. The modern idea of unemployment
emerged, but its definition and its measurement were
not standardized yet. This interest in labor statistics
was linked to the fairly general development of a
specific ‘labor law’ and the first so-called ‘social
welfare’ legislation, such as Bismarck’s in Germany,
or that developed in the Nordic countries in the 1890s.
It is significant that the application of the sample survey
method (then called ‘representative’ survey) was first
tested in Norway in 1895, precisely in view of
preparing a new law enacting general pension funds
and invalidity insurance: this suggests the consistency
of the political, technical, and cognitive dimensions of
this co-construction.
These forms of consistency are found in the statistics
systems that were extensively developed, at a different
scale, after 1945. At that time, public policies were
governed by a number of issues: the regulation of the
macroeconomic balance as seen through the Keyne-
sian model, the reduction of social inequalities and the
struggle against unemployment thanks to social-
welfare systems, the democratization of school, etc.
Some people then spoke of ‘revolution’ in government
statistics (Duncan and Shelton 1978), and underscored
15084
its four components, which have largely shaped the
present statistics systems. National accounting, a vast
construction integrating a large number of statistics
from different sources, was the instrument on which
the macroeconomic models resulting from the Keyne-
sian analysis were based. Sample surveys made it
possible to study a much broader range of issues and
to accumulate quantitative descriptions of the social
world, which were unthinkable at a time when the
observation techniques were limited to censuses and
monographs. Statistical coordination, an apparently
strictly administrative affair, was indispensable to
make consistent the observations resulting from dif-
ferent fields. Finally, beginning in 1960, the generaliza-
tion of computer data processing radically transformed
the activity of bureaux of statistics.
So, ‘official statistics,’ placed at the junction between
social studies, mathematics, and information on public
policies, has become an important research com-
ponent in the social studies. Given, however, that from
the institutional standpoint it is generally placed
outside, it is often hardly perceived by those who seek
to draw up a panorama of these sciences. In fact, the
way bureaus of statistics operate and are integrated
into administrative and scientific contexts varies a lot
from one country to another, so a history and a
sociology of social studies cannot omit examining
these institutions, which are often perceived as mere
suppliers of data assumed to ‘reflect reality,’ when they
are actually places where this ‘reality’ is instituted
through co-constructed operations of social represen-
tation, public action, and statistical measurement.
See also: Estimation: Point and Interval; Galton, Sir
Francis (1822–1911); Neyman, Jerzy (1894–1981);
Pearson, Karl (1857–1936); Probability and Chance:
Philosophical Aspects; Quantification in History;
Quantification in the History of the Social Sciences;
Quetelet, Adolphe (1796–1874); Statistical Methods,
History of: Post-1900; Statistical Methods, History of:
Pre-1900; Statistics: The Field
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Anderson M J 1988 The American Census. A Social History. Yale
University Press, New Haven, CT
Desrosie' res A 1998 The Politics of Large Numbers. A History of
Statistical Reasoning. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA
Duncan J W, Shelton W C 1978 Re
olution in United States
Go
ernment Statistics, 1926–1976. US Department of Com-
merce, Washington, DC
Gigerenzer G et al. 1989 The Empire of Chance. How Probability
Changed Science and E
eryday Life. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK
Hacking I 1990 The Taming of Chance. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK
Klein J L 1997 Statistics Visions in Time. A History of Time
Series Analysis, 1662–1938. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK

Lazarsfeld P 1977 Notes in the history of quantification in
sociology: Trends, sources and problems. In: Kendall M,
Plackett R L (eds.) Studies in the History of Statistics and
Probability. Griffin, London, Vol. 2, pp. 213–69
MacKenzie D 1981 Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930. The Social
Construction of Scientific Knowledge. Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh, UK
Patriarca S 1996 Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in
Nineteenth-century Italy. Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, UK
Pearson K 1911 The Grammar of Science, 3rd edn rev. and enl..
A. and C. Black, London
Porter T 1986 The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Stigler S M 1986 The History of Statistics: The Measurement of
Uncertainty Before 1900. Belknap Press of Harvard University
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Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
A. Desrosie' res
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Statistics: The Field
Statistics is a term used to refer to both a field of
scientific inquiry and a body of quantitative methods.
The field of statistics has a 350-year intellectual history
rooted in the origins of probability and the rudi-
mentary tools of political arithmetic of the seventeenth
century. Statistics came of age as a separate discipline
with the development of formal inferential theories in
the twentieth century. This article briefly traces some of
this historical development and discusses current
methodological and inferential approaches as well as
some cross-cutting themes in the development of new
statistical methods.
1. Introduction
Statistics is a body of quantitative methods associated
with empirical observation. A primary goal of these
methods is coping with uncertainty. Most formal
statistical methods rely on probability theory to
express this uncertainty and to provide a formal
mathematical basis for data description and for
analysis. The notion of variability associated with
data, expressed through probability, plays a funda-
mental role in this theory. As a consequence, much
statistical effort is focused on how to control and
measure variability and or how to assign it to its
sources.
Almost all characterizations of statistics as a field
include the following elements:
(a) Designing experiments, surveys, and other sys-
tematic forms of empirical study.
(b) Summarizing and extracting information from
data.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Statistics: The Field
(c) Drawing formal inferences from empirical data
through the use of probability.
(d) Communicating the results of statistical investi-
gations to others, including scientists, policy makers,
and the public.
This article describes a number of these elements,
and the historical context out of which they grew. It
provides a broad overview of the field, that can serve
as a starting point to many of the other statistical
entries in this encyclopedia.
2. The Origins of the Field
The word ‘statistics’ is related to the word ‘state’ and
the original activity that was labeled as statistics was
social in nature and related to elements of society
through the organization of economic, demographic,
and political facts. Paralleling this work to some
extent was the development of the probability calculus
and the theory of errors, typically associated with the
physical sciences (see Statistical Methods, History of:
Pre-1900). These traditions came together in the
nineteenth century and led to the notion of statistics as
a collection of methods for the analysis of scientific
data and the drawing of inferences therefrom.
As Hacking (1990) has noted: ‘By the end of the
century chance had attained the respectability of a
Victorian valet, ready to be the logical servant of the
natural, biological and social sciences’ ( p. 2). At the
beginning of the twentieth century, we see the emerg-
ence of statistics as a field under the leadership of Karl
Pearson, George Udny Yule, Francis Y. Edgeworth,
and others of the ‘English’ statistical school. As Stigler
(1986) suggests:
Before 1900 we see many scientists of different fields
developing and using techniques we now recognize as
belonging to modern statistics. After 1900 we begin to
see identifiable statisticians developing such tech-
niques into a unified logic of empirical science that
goes far beyond its component parts. There was no
sharp moment of birth; but with Pearson and Yule and
the growing number of students in Pearson’s lab-
oratory, the infant discipline may be said to have
arrived. (p. 361)
Pearson’s laboratory at University College, London
quickly became the first statistics department in the
world and it was to influence subsequent developments
in a profound fashion for the next three decades.
Pearson and his colleagues founded the first methodo-
logically-oriented statistics journal, Biometrika, and
they stimulated the development of new approaches to
statistical methods. What remained before statistics
could legitimately take on the mantle of a field of
inquiry, separate from mathematics or the use of
statistical approaches in other fields, was the de-
velopment of the formal foundations of theories of
inference from observations, rooted in an axiomatic
theory of probability.
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ISBN: 0-08-043076-7