In the analysis of deprivation we have followed what is by now the usual pattern of quantitative analysis in that we have treated the variables as distinct components of a path model. This is a perfectly legitimate process, but like all analytic processes, it involves a degree of abstraction that gives the sociologist the feeling he may be missing some of the realities of the social situation as it appears to the ethnographer and the social actor. The temptation, then, is to jump straight from path-analytic modeling to participant observation, and to investigate the perceptions of citizens. The difficulty about this jump is that it creates a disjunction rather than a link; we have no way of mapping the interpreted analysis into the path analysis or vice versa. We may be willing to make certain plausible assumptions, particularly about extreme cases. For example, the hard-core problem children from Branch Street whom Marie Paneth tried to socialize are very likely to be at the bottom of all variables in the path analysis. (Mrs. Paneth worked in Branch Street during World War II; it is probable that not a few similar streets could have been found among the tenements of Glasgow where some of our sample members grew up.) But what of the mass of people who were not brought up in rags but who never attended university?

It is not in fact necessary to jump straight from path analysis to the typical community study or investigation of people in a particular occupation or possessing a certain occupational experience.