The purpose of this article is to introduce social scientists to the Pearson System of
Frequency Curves. This statistical procedure is an important tool in the identification
of a wide range of statistical distributions from empirical data. Given that sociological
phenomena are more likely to conform to various types of skewed distributions rather
than the normal one, it is a methodological advantage to identify a specific skewed dis
tribution which conforms to a statistical distribution. The article presents several em
pirical examples in the identification of statistical distributions and provides possible
useful applications in social research.
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