Historical inference and event-structure analysis

International Review of Social History

Volumn 43, Issue 6, 1998, Pages 145-165

  Griffin, Larry J ^a   Korstad, Robert R ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0032276210     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0020859000115135     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Corsaro, William and David Heise, "Event Structure Models from Ethnographic Data", Sociological Methodology, 1990 (1990), pp. 1-57.
2. Heise, David, "Computer Analysis of Cultural Structures", Social Science Computer Review, 6 (1988), pp. 183-196.
3. Heise, David, "Modeling Event Structures", Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 14 (1989), pp. 139-169.
4. Heise, David, and Elsa Lewis, Introduction to ETHNO (Raleigh, NC, 1988). This is the ESA-ETHNO computer manual; it is invaluable.
5. Griffin, Larry J., "Narrative, Event-Structure Analysis and Causal Interpretation in Historical Sociology", American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1993), pp. 1094-1133. This was the first, and still most fully developed, attempt to wed ESA's logic and mode of operation to issues of causal interpretation, narrative, historical causation, comparative method, etc. Much of the article is devoted to the explication of ESA and includes a long, detailed substantive application of ESA to a 1930 lynching in Mississippi.
6. Brown, Cliff and John Bruggemann, "Mobilizing Interracial Solidarity: A Comparison of the 1919 and 1937 Steel Industry Labor Organizing Drives", Mobilization, 2 (1997), pp. 47-70. Using ESA, Brown and Bruggemann formally compare the event-structures of the two organizing drives in steel to comprehend better why one failed (1919) and one succeeded (1937).
7. Griffin, Larry J. and Robert R. Korstad, "Class as Race and Gender: The Making and Breaking of a Union Local in the Jim Crow South", Social Science History, 19 (1985), pp. 425-454. In our previous publication on Local 22, we relied on but did not report the ESA analysis. This example thus shows how ESA may be used solely as a heuristic aiding the analyst to interpret the event and to structure her or his narrative of its history.
8. Griffin, Larry J., Paula Clark and Joanne Sandberg, "Narrative and Event: Historical Sociology and Lynching", in Fitzhugh Brundage (ed.), Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the New South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997). Griffin et al. argue that ESA is a useful tool to understand why some "lynchings-in-the-making" were averted and others completed.
9. Isaac, Larry, Debra Street and Stan Knapp, "Analyzing Historical Contingency with Formal Methods: The Case of the 'Relief Explosion' and 1968", Sociological Methods and Research, 23 (1994), pp. 114-141. Isaac et al. productively apply ESA to an unusual "event", the tumultuous year 1968.
10. Kiser, Edgar, "The Revival of Narrative in Historical Sociology: What Rational Choice Can Contribute", Politics and Society, 24 (1996), pp. 249-271. Criticizing much of the "new narrativism" in sociology for its inductivism, Kiser urges the wedding of narrative analysis (including ESA) to a powerful deductive frame, rational choice theory.