Otis Dudley Duncan

Who was Otis Dudley Duncan?

Otis Dudley Duncan was "the most important quantitative sociologist in the world in the latter half of the 20th century", according to sociologist Leo Goodman. His book The American Occupational Structure, which received the American Sociological Association's Sorokin Award, documented how parents transmit their societal status to their children. Duncan compiled his thoughts on the major issues of the field into Notes on Social Measurement, which he considered his greatest work.

One of the most influential sociologists in history, Otis Dudley Duncan was instrumental in transforming mainstream American sociology into a quantitatively based empirical social science in the second half of the twentieth century. His key scholarly contributions include the introduction of path analysis to sociology; the measurement of occupational socioeconomic standing with an index; the study of intergenerational occupational mobility; the spatial analysis of residential patterns; the application and advancement of log-linear models and Rasch models for categorical social science data; and a landmark treatise on social measurement.