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Concept
Quantitative revolution
Summary
The quantitative revolution (QR) was a paradigm shift that sought to develop a more rigorous and systematic methodology for the discipline of geography. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive (idiographic) geography to an empirical law-making (nomothetic) geography. The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and marked a rapid change in the method behind geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science.
In the history of geography, the quantitative revolution was one of the four major turning points of modern geography – the other three being environmental determinism, regional geography and critical geography. It contributed to the technical geography branch of the discipline, culminating in the emergence of quantitative geography, which includes geographic information science, geoinformatics, and spatial analysis.
The quantitative revolution had occurred earlier in economics and psychology and contemporaneously in political science and other social sciences and to a lesser extent in history.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s:
The regional tradition, which believed the objective of geography was to describe and explain the areal differentiation of the Earth's surface, dominated geography studies.
The closing of many geography departments and courses in universities took place, most notably, the abolition of the geography program at Harvard University (a highly prestigious institution) in 1948 was seen as an “academic war over the field of geography".
There was a continuing division between human and physical geography – general talk of human geography becoming an autonomous subject.
Geography was regarded as overly descriptive and unscientific – it was claimed that there was no explanation of why processes or phenomena occurred.
Geography was seen as exclusively educational and "not a university subject" – there were few if any applications of contemporary geography.
Official source
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