Analytic Induction

Abstract

Analytic induction (AI) is a research logic used to guide data collection, develop analysis, and organize the presentation of research findings. The strategy of AI is exclusively qualitative, seeking encounters with new varieties of data in order to force revisions that will make the analysis valid when applied to an increasingly diverse range of cases. Originally understood as an alternative to statistical sampling methodologies, AI continues primarily as a way to develop explanations of the interactional processes through which people develop what, in their experiences, are homogenous forms of distinctive social action. AI transforms and produces a sociological appreciation of phenomena along recurrent lines. The target phenomenon is progressively redefined to address a process; explanatory conditions are redefined to specify the interactions through which people, by learning, recognizing, or becoming aware of features of their biographies and circumstances, in effect set up the motivational dynamics of their own conduct. The methodology of AI thus dovetails with the theoretical perspective of symbolic interaction and produces a phenomenologically grounded sociology. AI also dovetails with ethnography's narrative style. One frequently cited weakness is that AI specifies only necessary but not sufficient conditions. Another is that it produces tautological explanations. The methodology does, however, support what might be called 'retrodiction': predictions, made at time 3, that if a given behavior is observed to have occurred at time 2, specific phenomena must have come into existence at time 1. Although rarely touted as 'policy research,' the upshot of an AI study is a documented portrayal of some segment of social life that is systematically misrepresented by the culture that supports power. AI's quest for systematic knowledge is no less secure than is the understanding that social life takes shape as people crystallize long-evolved perspectives, familiar behavioral techniques, and cultured interpersonal sensibilities into patterns of situationally responsive conduct and distinctive qualities of lived experience.