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Statistical methods have had a successful half-century in sociology, contributing to a greatly improved standard of scientific rigor in the discipline. I identify three overlapping postwar generations of statistical methods in sociology, based on the kinds of data they address. The first generation, which started in the late 1940s, deals with cross-tabulations and focuses on measures of association and log-linear models, perhaps the area of statistics to which sociology has contributed the most. The second generation, which began in the 1960s, deals with unit-level survey data and focuses on LISREL-type causal models and event-history analysis. The third generation, starting to emerge in the late 1980s, deals with data that do not fall easily into either of these categories, either because they have a different form, such as texts or narratives, or because dependence is a crucial aspect, as with spatial or social network data. There are many new challenges, and the area is ripe for statistical research; several major institutions have recently launched new initiatives in statistics and the social sciences.

This article describes an interesting application of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). MCMC is used to assess competing explanations of marital fertility decline. Data collected during the World Fertility Study in Iran are analyzed using methods developed to perform discrete time event history analyses in which unobserved heterogeneity is explicitly accounted for. The usual age-period-cohort identifiability problem is compounded by the presence of a fourth clock, duration since previous birth, and a fifth clocklike variable, mother's parity. The authors resolve this problem by modeling some of the clocks parametrically using codings suggested by alternating conditional expectation (ACE) and Bayes factors to decide which clocks are necessary. Compound Laplace-Metropolis estimates are used to compute Bayes factors for comparing alternative models. The new methods enable the authors to conclude that Iran's fertility decline was primarily a period effect and not a cohort effect, that it started before the Family Planning Program was initiated, that it was the same for women at all educational levels but varied depending on husband's education, and that it was greatest in the largest cities, particularly Tehran.

L'experience d'une separation familiale durant l'enfance augmente substantiellement la tendance des hommes a se retrouver dans la strate occupationnelle la plus basse. La separation familiale affaiblit la relation d'association entre les dimensions de la strate professionnelle d'origine et de la strate de destination pour les hommes. Le statut socio-economique atteint par les hommes issus de familles eclatees est moins similaire au statut socio-economique d'origine que dans le cas d'hommes issus de familles intactes. Les hommes issus de foyers traditionnels bi-parentaux font preuve d'une plus forte tendance a la transmission occupationnelle intergenerationnelle que les hommes issus de familles eclatees. Ces effets sont identiques entre populations noire et blanche