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Designing Social Inquiry focuses on improving qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. What are the right questions to ask? How should you define and make inferences about causal effects? How can you avoid bias? How many cases do you need, and how should they be selected? What are the consequences of unavoidable problems in qualitative research, such as measurement error, incomplete information, or omitted variables? What are proper ways to estimate and report the uncertainty of your conclusions?
This handbook provides a clear examination of case-oriented research. It defines case-based social research as a subfield of methodology.
James W. Davis critically examines central claims and assumptions made by proponents of the scientific method in general, as well as the specific problems confronting the social sciences in particular, developing a middle ground between the uncritical application of the scientific method in pursuit of empirical truths and the postmodernist assertion that there is no foundation upon which to build an edifice of social science.
New theories and theory-based methodological approaches have found their way into Comparative Education - just as into Comparative Social Science more generally - in increasing number in the recent past. The essays of this volume express and critically discuss quite a range of these positions such as, inter alia, the theory of self-organizing social systems and the morphogenetic approach; the theory of long waves in economic development and world-systems analysis; historical sociology and the sociology of knowledge; as well as critical hermeneutics and post-modernist theorizing. With reference to such theories and approaches, the chapters - written by scholars from Europe, the USA and Australia - outline alternative research agendas for the comparative study of the social and educational fabric of the modern world. In so doing, they also expound frames of reference for re-considering the intellectual shaping, or Discourse Formation, of Comparative Education as a field of study.
The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic development and others do not. The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross-national data. The authors explain the political intuition underlying their theory in nontechnical language, reserving formal proofs for chapter appendixes. They conclude by presenting policy prescriptions based on what has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically.
An encyclopedia about various methods of qualitative research.
With innovative new chapters on process tracing, regression analysis, and natural experiments, the second edition of Rethinking Social Inquiry further extends the reach of this path-breaking book. The original debate with King, Keohane, and Verba_now updated_remains central to the volume, and the new material illuminates evolving discussions of essential methodological tools. Thus, process tracing is often invoked as fundamental to qualitative analysis, but is rarely applied with precision. Pitfalls of regression analysis are sometimes noted, but often are inadequately examined. And the complex assumptions and trade-offs of natural experiments are poorly understood. The second edition extends the methodological horizon through exploring these critical tools. A distinctive feature of this edition is the online placement of four chapters from the prior edition, all focused on the dialogue with King, Keohane, and Verba. Also posted online are exercises for teaching process tracing and understanding process tracing.
The classic work on qualitative methods in political science Designing Social Inquiry presents a unified approach to qualitative and quantitative research in political science, showing how the same logic of inference underlies both. This stimulating book discusses issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and the uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and getting the most out of qualitative research. It addresses topics such as interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. The book only uses mathematical notation to clarify concepts, and assumes no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics. Featuring a new preface by Robert O. Keohane and Gary King, this edition makes an influential work available to new generations of qualitative researchers in the social sciences.