Quantitative history
Quantitative history involves the use of methods of statistical analysis drawn from the social sciences, but used on historical data. It was posited by its exponents as providing a way for historians to obtain more 'scientific' results – for instance, allowing the analysis of census returns to obtain accurate breakdowns of the population at a particular time, rather than relying on the qualitative but selective reading of a variety of different sources which had characterised the practise of history hitherto. Its emergence in the 1960s coincided both with the increasing popularity of social science methodology and with the dawning of the computer age. Critics have suggested that quantitative history makes assumptions about the nature of historical data ignore the factors influencing its production, and the cultural turn has called into question more broadly the epistomology of the social sciences, but particularly in economic history (cliometrics) the application of quantitative methods has become integrated as part of a broader historical approach.
