Quantitative revolution

The quantitative revolution QR[n] was a paradigm shift that sought to establish a more rigorous together with systematic methodology for a discipline of geography. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive idiographic geography to an empirical law-making nomothetic geography. The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s in addition to 1960s and marked a rapid conform in the method slow geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science.

In the history of geography, the quantitative revolution was one of the four major turning-points of innovative geography – the other three being environmental determinism, regional geography and critical geography.

The quantitative revolution had occurred earlier in economics and psychology and contemporaneously in political science and other social sciences and to a lesser extent in history.

Antecedents

During the late 1940s and early 1950s:

All of these events submission a threat to geography's position as an academic subject, and thus geographers began seeking new methods to counter critique.