Reply to Bollen, Firebaugh, and Rubin
Richard A. Berk, Bruce Western, Robert E. Weiss · Sociological Methodology · 1995
For many common in sociology (and elsewhere), the imagery of a large number of random samples from a real population does serious violence to the empirical setting being studied. The data in hand are all the data there are, or that could be. We call such data an apparent population. Since frequentist approaches rest on the imagery of many repeated samples from a single population, what Rubin calls unique datasets undermine frequentist inference. In contrast, Bayesian inference is possible and may produce satisfactory inference.