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Book Cover for: Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, Gary King

Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research

Gary King

At a moment when acute disagreement among scholars over the appropriateness of qualitative and quantitative research methods threatens to undermine the validity and coherence of the social sciences, Gary King, Robert Keohane and Sidney Verba have written a timely and farsighted book that develops a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference. They illuminate the logic of good quantitative and good qualitative research designs and demonstrate that the two do not fundamentally differ. 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? How would you know if you were wrong?

Book Details

  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publish Date: May 22nd, 1994
  • Pages: 264
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.10in - 0.60in - 0.80lb
  • EAN: 9780691034713
  • Categories: ResearchSociology - GeneralGeneral

About the Author

Gary King is Professor of Government and Director of the Harvard Data Center at Harvard University. Robert O. Keohane is Stanfield Professor of International Peace at Harvard University. Sidney Verba is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library.

Praise for this book

"The book is marked by a very careful building up of all concepts; by clear, vivid writing; and by an excellent use of extended examples from the work of such scholars as Nina Halpern, Atul Kohli, and David Laiting."-- "Journal of Politics"