Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research

by Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, Sidney Verba

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While heated arguments between practitioners of qualitative and quantitative research have begun to test the very integrity of the social sciences, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba have produced a farsighted and timely book that promises to sharpen and strengthen a wide range of research performed in this field. These leading scholars, each representing diverse academic traditions, have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, show more where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. Their book demonstrates that the same logic of inference underlies both good quantitative and good qualitative research designs, and their approach applies equally to each. Providing precepts intended to stimulate and discipline thought, the authors explore issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and generally improving qualitative research. Among the specific topics they address are interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. Mathematical notation is occasionally used to clarify concepts, but no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics is assumed. The unified logic of inference that this book explicates will be enormously useful to qualitative researchers of all traditions and substantive fields. show less

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6 Works 421 Members
Gary King is David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University. Kay Lehman Schlozman is J. Joseph Moakley Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Norman H. Nie is Research Professor of Political Science at Standford University and Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago.
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19 Works 939 Members
Robert O. Keohane is Professor of International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.
19+ Works 634 Members
Sidney Verba was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 26, 1932. He received a bachelor's degree in history and literature from Harvard University and a master's degree and doctorate in politics from Princeton University. He was an assistant and associate professor at Princeton and a full professor at Stanford University and the University of Chicago show more before returning to Harvard in 1973. He taught at Harvard for more than 30 years before retiring in 2007. He was also the director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007. He co-wrote several books including The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations written with Gabriel A. Almond; The Changing American Voter written with Norman Nie and John Petrocik; Participation and Political Equality: A Seven Nation Comparison written with Norman Nie and Jae-on Kim; Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research written with Gary King and Robert Keohane; and Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Democracy written with Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry E. Brady. Verba died on March 4, 2019 at the age of 86. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Canonical title
Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research

Classifications

Genres
Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics and Government, General Nonfiction, Philosophy
DDC/MDS
300.72Society, government, & cultureSocial sciences, sociology & anthropologySocial sciencesEducation And ResearchSocial sciences--research
LCC
H61 .K5437Social sciencesSocial sciences (General)
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297
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107,583
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(4.11)
Languages
English, Spanish
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Paper, Ebook
ISBNs
9
ASINs
5