Research Design in Political Science How to Practice what they Preach [Hardcover]

When embarking on a new research project students face the same core research design issues. This volume provides readers with practical guidelines for both qualitative and quantitative designs, discusses the typical trade-offs involved in choosing them and is rich in examples from actual research.Designing Research in Political Science; T.Gschwend & F.Schimmelfennig Increasing the Relevance of Research Questions; M.Lehnert, B.Miller & A.Wonka Concept Specification in Political Science Research; A.Wonka Typologies in Social Inquiry; M.Lehnert Making Measures Capture Concepts; B.Miller Achieving Comparability of Secondary Data; J.Rathke Dealing Effectively with Selection Bias in Large-n Research; J.Thiem Case Selection and Selection Bias in Small-n Research; D.Leuffen Selecting Independent Variables; U.Sieberer Discriminating among Rival Explanations: Some Tools for Small-n Researchers; A.D?r Falsification in Theory-Guided Empirical Social Research; D.De Bi?vre Lessons for the Dialogue between Theory and Data; T.Gschwend & F.Schimmelfennig

'The internal structure of each of the chapters nicely fits the hands-on approach taken in this book. Each chapter starts by introducing and discussing the specific research design issue addressed within it. Five to ten practical guidelines are then given as to how to translate the abstract reasoning into concrete research. Finally, examples of real research are used to illustrate the abstract discussion and to provide flesh to the guidelines. The second strong point is the distinction made between outcome-centric and factor-centric research, or in other words research that seeks to identify the causes of an outcome (or effect) and that research that is interested in the effect of a specific cause. While others have made this distinction before, this book elaborates on the consequences of this distinction for several elements of the research design such as the implications for the function of typologies (chapterlÓ+