In the observational study of social systems, the major conceptual innovation of the last century was General Systems Theory.

Preface; Reading this book quickly; Part I. Introduction: 1. Advertisement; 2. History; 3. The language of sequential analysis; Part II. Fitting the Timetable: 4. The order of the Markov chain; 5. Stationarity of the Markov chain; 6. Homogeneity; 7. Everyday computations of stationarity, order and homogeneity; 8. Sampling distributions; 9. Lag sequential analysis; Part III. The Timetable and the Contextual Design: 10. Log-linear models; 11. Log-linear models: review and examples; 12. A single case analysis of the timetable; 13. Logit models and logistic regression; 14. The problem of autocontingency and its solutions; 15. Recent advances: a brief overview; 16. A brief summary; References; Index.