THE AMERICAN
JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
VOLUME XV MAY, IQIO
Number 6
THE SOCIAL MARKING SYSTEM
PROFESSOR FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS Columbia University
In their quantitative aspect many data of sociology are posi- tions in a scheme, rather than distances from zero. Tables of births, deaths, and migrations, like tables of height and of weight, give us measures from zero. Degrees of difference or of resemblance which we observe among our acquaintances and others, the affiliations of nationalities and of races, of religious beliefs, and of political interests, the values that we assign to ability and to conduct, and the social ranks that make up differ- entiated communities, are merely positions in a scheme.
Sir Francis Galton long ago showed that when positions in a scheme are successive, and may be successively numbered, and when the instances in which given phenomena fall into suc- cessively numbered positions, can be counted, and their frequen- cies set down, we can legitimately subject the numerical data so assembled to familiar methods of statistical analysis. We can plot their rough curves of magnitude and of frequency; we can ascertain their medians, quartiles, and probable errors; we can determine their modes. Whether we can also make significant use of their standard deviations and coefficients of variation, is a question that need not now be considered.
In order to assemble and to sort such data, however, we must have a marking-scale. Also we must have a concrete knowledge of the facts to be sorted, like that on which we rely when we assign numerical grades to examination papers, or to tests of
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