アメリカの最近の人文地理学研究法における定量化傾向
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概要
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One of the spectacular phenomena in recent American human geography is the development of quantification employing various advanced techniques of mathematics or statistics. However, its status in the methodology of geography so far has been rather ambiguous. A considerable number of articles have been published recently, either taking the side of quantification, or criticizing it bitterly, or commenting it with recognition of its merits but without full support.<BR>Quantifiers' distinguished contribution seems to be recognized well when it is specifically concerned with techniques of analysis rather than with methodology. Methodology of geography, at least of human geography, has been confirmed repeatedly by a number of methodological geographers to be an academic discipline in that synthesis of various different and/or similar human and physical phenomena is the ultimate objective. As O. H. K. Spate and A. H. Robinson comment about the quantification developing very fast in American human geography, objects of geographic studies are primarily concerned with man's activities and works that are to be divided into very detailed segments and, at the same time, to be considered as an integral whole. This the quantifiers have not aimed at. Their outstanding contribution that the techniques of analyzing geographic facts have been made more scientific and objective should be considered more as an epoch-making threshold toward an academic objective science. Simultaneously, however, an almost infinite number of geographic facts and phenomena must be analyzed or synthesized systematically even if techniques of analysis or synthesis are more qualitative or "subjective" possibly because of a lack of quantitative data, otherwise the scope of geographic studies will be further limited and geography may have give way many of its study objects to other disciplines.<BR>Thus, we may come to the conclusion that we urgently need a much larger number of productive geographers who can in the aggregate conduct various kinds of research, either quantitative or qualitative, for example, through which our knowledge and recognition of the earth's surface could become more completed.
- 社団法人 東京地学協会の論文