analytic of sociology on social interactionism

that is, rejecting variable analysis as the mode of analysis that can produce valid explanations, analytical sociology seeks to provide detailed accounts that lay bare exactly how behavior, designed and carried out independently by autonomous indi-viduals, become aligned to produce the empirically observable behavioral patterns that sociologists discover in all areas of social life. In other words, the core thrust of analytical sociology is the ambition to make such regularities intelligible by specify-ing in detail how they are brought about and, thereby, to replace mainly variable-driven empirical analysis with a methodology that explicitly addresses the causal mechanisms underlying statistical correlations. This ambition is, for instance, for-mulated as follows: Analytical sociology is … concerned with explaining important social facts such as network structures, patterns of residential segregation, typical beliefs, cultural tastes, and common ways of acting. It explains such facts by detailing in clear and precise ways the mechanisms through which the social facts were brought about. Making sense of the relationship between micro and macro thus is one of the central concerns of analytical sociology (Hedström & Ylikoski, 2013). To illustrate, the emergence of residential areas with a high concentration of one or few ethnic groups is a macro level pattern that can be accounted for as the unintended outcome of a segregation mechanism. As Schelling (1978) suggests, residential segregation arises out of myriad choices made independently by indi-vidual households who initially live in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Accord-ingly, whenever a white household, for instance, moves to a neighborhood where the majority of the residents are white, it leaves the original neighborhood with even fewer white families. If this trend continues, then the original, initially hetero-geneous and spontaneously mixed neighborhood is eventually turned into one that is ethically more segregated than most people prefer. Similarly, if families without children tend to move out of neighborhoods with many children, they leave these neighborhoods with an even higher concentration of child-rich families, thus unin-tentionally generating neighborhoods that are strongly segregated by parental status.