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Author: Alexander L. George
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262262894
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
The use of case studies to build and test theories in political science and the other social sciences has increased in recent years. Many scholars have argued that the social sciences rely too heavily on quantitative research and formal models and have attempted to develop and refine rigorous methods for using case studies. This text presents a comprehensive analysis of research methods using case studies and examines the place of case studies in social science methodology. It argues that case studies, statistical methods, and formal models are complementary rather than competitive. The book explains how to design case study research that will produce results useful to policymakers and emphasizes the importance of developing policy-relevant theories. It offers three major contributions to case study methodology: an emphasis on the importance of within-case analysis, a detailed discussion of process tracing, and development of the concept of typological theories. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences will be particularly useful to graduate students and scholars in social science methodology and the philosophy of science, as well as to those designing new research projects, and will contribute greatly to the broader debate about scientific methods.
Author: Alexander L. George
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262262894
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
The use of case studies to build and test theories in political science and the other social sciences has increased in recent years. Many scholars have argued that the social sciences rely too heavily on quantitative research and formal models and have attempted to develop and refine rigorous methods for using case studies. This text presents a comprehensive analysis of research methods using case studies and examines the place of case studies in social science methodology. It argues that case studies, statistical methods, and formal models are complementary rather than competitive. The book explains how to design case study research that will produce results useful to policymakers and emphasizes the importance of developing policy-relevant theories. It offers three major contributions to case study methodology: an emphasis on the importance of within-case analysis, a detailed discussion of process tracing, and development of the concept of typological theories. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences will be particularly useful to graduate students and scholars in social science methodology and the philosophy of science, as well as to those designing new research projects, and will contribute greatly to the broader debate about scientific methods.
Author: Frederick Cooper
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520209572
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
"This superb collection assembles a number of stimulating and theoretically current contributions by outstanding scholars."—Angelique Haugerud, author of The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya
Author: Mark Solovey
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262358751
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.
Author: Simon Bastow
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446293254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 625
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Book Description
The impact agenda is set to shape the way in which social scientists prioritise the work they choose to pursue, the research methods they use and how they publish their findings over the coming decade, but how much is currently known about how social science research has made a mark on society? Based on a three year research project studying the impact of 360 UK-based academics on business, government and civil society sectors, this groundbreaking new book undertakes the most thorough analysis yet of how academic research in the social sciences achieves public policy impacts, contributes to economic prosperity, and informs public understanding of policy issues as well as economic and social changes. The Impact of the Social Sciences addresses and engages with key issues, including: identifying ways to conceptualise and model impact in the social sciences developing more sophisticated ways to measure academic and external impacts of social science research explaining how impacts from individual academics, research units and universities can be improved. This book is essential reading for researchers, academics and anyone involved in discussions about how to improve the value and impact of funded research.
Author: Hunter Heyck
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417103
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
In the years after World War II, a new generation of scholars redefined the central concepts and practices of social science in America. Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, “high modern” social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behavior—and to remake the world in the image of their new model man. In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists—shaped by encounters with the ongoing “organizational revolution” and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control—embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behavior implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction. These social scientists trained a generation of decision-makers in schools of business and public administration, wrote the basic textbooks from which millions learned how the economy, society, polity, culture, and even the mind worked, and drafted the position papers, books, and articles that helped set the terms of public discourse in a new era of mass media, think tanks, and issue networks. Drawing on close readings of key texts and a broad survey of more than 1,800 journal articles, Heyck follows the dollars—and the dreams—of a generation of scholars that believed in “the system.” He maps the broad landscape of changes in the social sciences, focusing especially intently on the ideas and practices associated with modernization theory, rational choice theory, and modeling. A highly accomplished historian, Heyck relays this complicated story with unusual clarity.
Author: Anol Bhattacherjee
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781475146127
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.
Author: Murray Webster
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080546145
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 574
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Book Description
Laboratory Experiments in the Social Sciences is the only book providing core information for researchers about the ways and means to conduct experiments. Its comprehensive regard for laboratory experiments encompasses "how-to explanations, investigations of philosophies and ethics, explorations of experiments in specific social science disciplines, and summaries of both the history and future of social science laboratories. No other book offers such a direct avenue to enlarging our knowledge in the social sciences.This collection of original chapters combines instructions and advice about the design of laboratory experiments in the social sciences with the array of other issues. While there are books on experimental design and chapters in more general methods books on design, theory, and ethical issues, no other book attempts to discuss the fundamental ideas of the philosophy of science or lays out the methods comprehensively or in such detail. Experimentation has recently prospered because of increasing interest in cross-disciplinary syntheses, and this book of advice, guidelines, and observations underline its potential and increasing importance.· Provides a comprehensive summary of issues in social science experimentation, from ethics to design, management, and financing· Offers "how-to" explanations of the problems and challenges faced by everyone involved in social science experiments· Pays attention to both practical problems and to theoretical and philosophical arguments· Defines commonalities and distinctions within and among experimental situations across the social sciences
Author: James Mahoney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214956
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
"Mahoney's starting point is the problem of essentialism in social science. Essentialism--the belief that the members of a category possess hidden properties ("essences") that make them members of the category and that endow them with a certain nature--is appropriate for scientific categories ("atoms", for instance) but not for human ones ("revolutions," for instance). Despite this, much social science research takes place from within an essentialist orientation; those who reject this assumption goes so far in the other direction as to reject the idea of an external reality, independent of human beings, altogether. Mahoney proposes an alternative approach that aspires to bridge this enduring rift in the social sciences between those who take a scientific approach and assume that social science categories correspond to external reality (and thus believe that the methods used in the natural sciences are generally appropriate for the social sciences) and those who take a constructivist approach and believe that because the categories used to understand the social world are humanly-constructed, they cannot possibly follow the science of the natural world. As the name suggests, scientific constructivism brings in aspects of both views and attempts to unite them. Drawing from cognitive science, it focuses on using the rational parts of our brain machinery to overcome the limitations and deeply seated biases (such as essentialism) of our evolved minds. Specifically, Mahoney puts forth a "set-theoretic analysis" that focuses on "sets" of categories as they exist in the mind that are also subject to the mathematical logic of set-theory. He spends the first four chapters of the book establishing the foundations and methods for set-theoretic analysis, the next four chapters looking and how this analysis fits with the existing tools of social science, and the final four chapters focusing on how this approach can be used to study and understand cases"--
Author: Stoker, Gerry
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447329376
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This book gathers an expert group of social scientists to showcase emerging forms of analysis and evaluation for public policy analysis. Each chapter highlights a different method or approach, putting it in context and highlighting its key features before illustrating its application and potential value to policy makers. Aimed at upper-level undergraduates in public policy and social work, it also has much to offer policy makers and practitioners themselves.
Author: Donald Fisher
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 9780472102709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Sociologist Donald Fisher studies the history and sociology of the social sciences
