以下繼續挑選美國社會學者Douglas V. Porpora的The Concept of Social Structure（1987）的導論若干段落加以分析。
Structural Sociology is essentially an attempt to construct a science of social structure that is completely autonomous of psychology. It thus begins with Durkheim’s dictum to explain social facts only in terms of other social facts and not in terms of processes at the level of the individual actor. Structural Sociology further follows Durkheim in the adoption of the explanatory method that Durkheim refers to as concomitant variations. According to this approach, quantitative variations in social facts are explained by associating them with quantitative variations in other social facts. Clearly this approach coincides nicely with the more refined statistical techniques that have been developed, such as correlation and regression.
