Finding Your Social Science Project (Strategies for Social Inquiry) - Softcover

Book 16 of 16: Strategies for Social Inquiry

Gerring, John

 
9781009114912: Finding Your Social Science Project (Strategies for Social Inquiry)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1009114913 ISBN 13: 9781009114912
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Synopsis

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.

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About the Authors

John Gerring is Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of several books, most recently: The Production of Knowledge: Enhancing Progress in Social Science (Cambridge, 2020; with Colin Elman & James Mahoney), and Population and Politics: The Impact of Scale (Cambridge, 2020; with Wouter Veenendaal), along with numerous articles. He is co-editor of Strategies for Social Inquiry, a book series at Cambridge University Press.

Jason Seawright is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela (2012), Multi-Method Social Science: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Tools (Cambridge, 2016), and Billionaires and Stealth Politics (2019, with Benjamin I. Page and Matthew Lacombe), along with numerous articles.

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Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication date
2022
Language
English
ISBN 10 
1009114913
ISBN 13 
9781009114912
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
354

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781009100397: Finding your Social Science Project: The Research Sandbox (Strategies for Social Inquiry)

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  1009100394 ISBN 13:  9781009100397
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2022
Hardcover