Otis D(udley) Duncan

Sociologist, born in Nocona, Texas, USA. He taught at the universities of Chicago (1951–62), Michigan (1962–73), Arizona (1973–83), and California, Santa Barbara (1983–7). Collaborating regularly with his wife Beverly Duncan, his many works on population, demographics, and urban sociology include The American Occupational Structure (co-authored, 1967) and Notes on Social Measurement (1984).

Otis Dudley Duncan (December 2, 1921, Nocona, Texas - November 16, 2004, Santa Barbara, California) was "the most important quantitative sociologist in the world in the latter half of the 20th century" (Leo Goodman).

He 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. the application and advancement of loglinear models and Rasch models for categorical social science data; and a landmark treatise on social measurement (Duncan 1984).

Duncan’s best known work is a 1967 book that he coauthored with the late Peter Blau, The American Occupational Structure. Based on quantitative analyses of the first large national survey of social mobility in the United States, the book elegantly depicts the process by which parents transmit their social standing to their children, particularly through affecting the children’s education. Today a worldwide community of sociologists specializing in social stratification and social mobility still work on elaborating the Blau-Duncan model to include such additional factors as cognitive ability, race, and social context in studying the transmission of social standing from one generation to the next.

Bibliography

Blau, Peter M.

Duncan, Otis Dudley. Notes on Social Measurement, Historical and Critical.

Xie, Yu. “Otis Dudley Duncan’s Legacy: the Demographic Approach to Quantitative Reasoning in Social Science.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.