Finding your Social Science Project: The Research Sandbox

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John Gerring (University of Texas, Austin) Jason Seawright (Northwestern University, Illinois)

Finding your Social Science Project

The Research Sandbox

John Gerring (University of Texas, Austin), Jason Seawright (Northwestern University, Illinois)

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English

Cambridge University Press
13 October 2022

Research methods: general; Interdisciplinary studies

Series: Strategies for Social Inquiry

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.

By: John Gerring (University of Texas Austin), Jason Seawright (Northwestern University, Illinois)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 246mm, Width: 171mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 600g
ISBN: 9781009114912
ISBN 10: 1009114913
Series: Strategies for Social Inquiry
Pages: 338
Publication Date: 13 October 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Finding your Social Science Project: The Research Sandbox

'Exploration and inspiration are necessary to locate a good social science topic; and this book tells you why and shows you how. Playful and insightful; highly recommended.' Richard Swedberg, Cornell University, New York 'This innovative book endorses diverse approaches to focusing research projects: induction from data, deduction from theory, concentration on data that lends itself to strong causal inference (for example, natural experiments), and concern with explaining major events in the world. The book is engagingly written and will be an excellent text in the classroom. Bravo for Gerring and Seawright!' David Collier, UC Berkeley