Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper, I theorize the ways in which word embeddings model three core premises of a structural linguistic theory of meaning: that meaning is coherent,…

I argue that what-makes-it-possible questions are a distinct and important kind of sociological research question. What is social phenomenon "P" made possible or enabled by? Results won't be about "P's" causes and causal relationships, but about its enablers and enabling relationships. I examine the character of…

Recent debates about qualitative methods have discussed the relative limitations and contributions of interviews in comparison to surveys and participant observation. These discussions have rarely considered how ethnographers themselves use interviews as part of their work. We suggest that Lizardo's discussion of three modes of culture…

Microblogging sites have become important data sources for studying network dynamics and information transmission. Both areas of study, however, require accurate counts of indegree, or follower counts; unfortunately, collection of complete time series on follower counts can be limited by application programming interface constraints, system…

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the 'situational critique' holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet…

Visual data have dramatically increased in quantity in the digital age, presenting new opportunities for social science research. However, the extensive time and labor costs to process and analyze these data with existing approaches limit their use. Computer vision methods hold promise but often require large and nonexistent training data to…

Taking a sociological view, we can investigate the empirical consequences of variations in the rhetoric of sociological methodology. The standards advocated in Qualitative Literacy divide communities of qualitative researchers, as they are not explicitly connected to an understanding of social ontology, unlike previous qualitative methodologies;…

Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for "theory building," but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoretically inclined ethnographers make…

Newly precise evidence of the trajectory of top incomes in the United States and around the world relies on shares and ratios, prompting new inquiry into their properties as inequality measures. Current evidence suggests a mathematical link between top shares and the Gini coefficient and empirical links extending as well to the Atkinson measure.…

Social scientists increasingly use video data, but large-scale analysis of its content is often constrained by scarce manual coding resources. Upscaling may be possible with the application of automated coding procedures, which are being developed in the field of computer vision. Here, we introduce computer vision to social scientists, review the…

This article pushes forward a critical dialogue about the value of visualization as a method of sociological theorizing. Building on a nascent literature, I argue theory diagrams may operate not only conjunctively but also disjunctively, independent from empirics; that their theoretical value lies not only in capturing sociological problems but…

Many sociological theories make critically different macropredictions when their microassumptions are implemented stochastically rather than deterministically. Deviations from individuals' behavioral patterns described by microtheories can spark cascades that change macrooutcomes, even when deviations are rare and random. With two experiments, we…

Qualitative coding procedures emanating from grounded theory were limited by technologies of the 1960s: colored pens, scissors, and index cards. Today, electronic documents can be flexibly stored, retrieved, and cross-referenced using qualitative data analysis (QDA) software. We argue the oft-cited grounded theory framework poorly fits many…

In common sociological research, income inequality is measured only at the aggregate level. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that there is more than meets the eye when inequality is indicated by a single measure. In this article, I introduce an alternative method that evaluates individuals' contributions to inequality as well as…

Multilevel models are increasingly used in sociology and other social sciences to analyze variation of tie outcomes in egocentrically sampled network data, particularly in studies of social support. Existing research assumes that the personal networks in the data do not overlap (i.e., they do not have actors in common), which makes standard…