Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, New Edition

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The classic work on qualitative methods in political science featuring a new preface by Robert O. Keohane and Gary King, making this an influential work available to new generations of qualitative researchers in the social sciences.

Designing Social Inquiry presents a unified approach to qualitative and quantitative research in political science, showing how the same logic of inference underlies both. This stimulating book discusses issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and the uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and getting the most out of qualitative research. It addresses topics such as interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. The book only uses mathematical notation to clarify concepts, and assumes no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics.

Author Bio

Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University. His books include A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem (Princeton). Robert O. Keohane is professor emeritus of international affairs at Princeton University. His books include After Hegemony (Princeton). Sidney Verba (19322019) was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor Emeritus and research professor of government at Harvard. His books include Unequal and Unrepresented (Princeton). King, Keohane, and Verba have each been elected as members of the National Academy of Sciences.