Thinking Through Methods: A Social Science Primer

Sociological research is hard enough alreadyyou dont need to make it even harder by smashing about like a bull in a china shop, not knowing what youre doing or where youre heading. Or so says John Levi Martin in this witty, insightful, and desperately needed primer on how to practice rigorous social science. Thinking Through Methods focuses on the practical decisions that you will need to make as a researcherwhere the data you are working with comes from and how that data relates to all the possible data you could have gathered. This is a users guide to sociological research, designed to be used at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Rather than offer mechanical rules and applications, Martin chooses instead to team up with the reader to think through and with methods. He acknowledges that we are human beingsand thus prone to the same cognitive limitations and distortions found in subjectsand proposes ways to compensate for these limitations. Martin also forcefully argues for principled symmetry, contending that bad ethics makes for bad research, and vice versa. Thinking Through Methods is a landmark workone that students will turn to again and again throughout the course of their sociological research.