Andrew P. Vayda

The aim in the chapter is to show ways in which the methods and explanations we use in the study of human actions and environmental changes can be made more effective and more defensible on logical and evidential grounds. Need for improvement is indicated by critical references to a variety of past studies, including some of the author's own. A main emphasis is on pragmatism in being guided in research and analysis by the goal of causal explanation. Among the issues considered in accord with this emphasis are the nature of causes and causal explanation, ways of judging explanations and explanation-oriented research, the use and misuse of generalizations, the use and misuse of evidence, prioritizing in research, moving from one level of analysis to another, and the uses made of statistics. Because of space constraints, most of the arguments and illustrative data are presented in compressed form, but some suggestions and references for their elaboration are provided, especially in the sometimes quite lengthy endnotes.

Social scientists using one or another concept of process have paid little attention to underlying issues of methodology and explanation. Commonly, the concept used is a loose one. When it is not, there often are other problems, such as errors of reification and of assuming that events sometimes connected in a sequence are invariably thus connected. While it may be useful to retain the term " process" for some sequences of intelligibly connected actions and events, causal explanation must be sought with respect to the events constituting processes rather than with respect to processes regarded as unitary entities.