Quantitative revolution

The quantitative revolution (QR)^[n] 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).

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:

All of these events presented a threat to geography's position as an academic subject, and thus geographers began seeking new methods to counter critique.

The quantitative revolution responded to the regional geography paradigm that was dominant at the time. Debates raged predominantly (although not exclusively) in the U.S., where regional geography was the major philosophical school. In the early 1950s, there was a growing sense that the existing paradigm for geographical research was not adequate in explaining how physical, economic, social, and political processes are spatially organized, ecologically related, or how outcomes generated by them are evidence for a given time and place. A growing number of geographers started to express their dissatisfaction with the traditional paradigm of the discipline and its focus on regional geography, deeming the work as too descriptive, fragmented, and non-generalizable. To address these concerns, early critics such as Ackerman suggested the systematization of the discipline. Soon thereafter, a series of debates regarding methodological approaches in geography took place. One of the first illustrations of this was the Schaefer vs. Hartshorne debate. In 1953 Exceptionalism in geography: A Methodological Examination was published. In this work, Schaefer rejected Hartshorne’s exceptionalist interpretations about the discipline of geography and having the region as its central object of study. Instead, Schaefer envisioned as the discipline’s main objective the establishment of morphological laws through scientific inquiry, i.e. incorporating laws and methods from other disciplines in the social sciences that place a greater emphasis on processes. Hartshorne, on the other hand, addressed Schaefer’s criticism in a series of publications, where he dismissed Schaefer’s views as subjective and contradictory. He also stressed the importance of describing and classifying places and phenomena, yet admitted that there was room for employing laws of generic relationships in order to maximize scientific understanding. In his view, however, there should be no hierarchy between these two approaches.

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