Of Sound History and Sound Methodology

Of Sound History and Sound Methodology: A Rejoinder My critique of Byers' study ofNantucket fertility patterns focused on sampling biases arising from his confounding of two critically important definitions-complete families and families with complete data. His failure to distinguish between these two concepts resulted in rules for sample selection which were not only unnecessarily restrictive but, moreover, served to produce a biased group of families, as I was able to show in a detailed comparison of the two studies.1 Now Byers purports to re-reexamine both sets of Nantucket findings. However, he ignores the central points of my criticism and concentrates his attention on historical issues which, although important in their own right, are secondary to the methodological shortcomings of his work. Byers specifically fails to respond to the following comments contained in my earlier critique: (I) The confounding of complete families with families with complete data, and the effects of his unnecessary exclusion of eligible families on his results. His elaborate effort to justify his results as plausible begs the question of why he chose inappropriate criteria for sample selection in the first place. This approach is the intellectual equivalent of propping up the walls when the house has burned down. Since the underlying structure has been destroyed, one must simply begin to build over again, in this case from the sample on up. More simply put, Byers' numbers are wrong; his attempts to explain them are thus an exercise in futility. (2) The unprecedented nature of his finding of deliberate family limitation among Nantucket couples as early as the I730s

Acoustics · Physics · Sound (geography) · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Land Rights and Reforms