---
title: "W. S. Robinson"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "W. S. Robinson"
aliases: ["William S. Robinson"]
first_seen: "2026-09-01T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["ecological fallacy","construct validity","garfield-seglen impact factor warning","statistics","measurement theory"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


American sociologist whose 1950 paper "Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals" (*American Sociological Review*) mathematically distinguishes a correlation computed on individuals from one computed on aggregated groups, and shows the two need not agree — using 1930 US Census data where the group-level ("ecological") correlation between race and illiteracy is roughly 4.7 times the individual-level correlation on the same population. The demonstration underlying the "ecological fallacy" is his, predating the term's later coinage.

Matters to this vault as the earliest-dated named account of the statistical mechanism behind [[entity-eugene-garfield|Garfield]]/[[entity-per-seglen|Seglen]]'s warning against journal-mean-citation-as-individual-proxy: a group-level aggregate tacitly substituted for an individual-level property, the identical shape Robinson demonstrated four decades before Seglen documented it in bibliometrics. Flagged first per the vault's ancestry rule — everything downstream in bibliometrics measurement critique inherits this shape.

## References
- [[claim-robinson-1950-ecological-fallacy-names-garfield-seglen-mechanism]]