Customer Reviews

Practice of Social Research

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A textbook on social-science research methodology has enormous potential to bore and frustrate even the most dedicated student. This is why Babbie's book will be a most useful tool for any student of the social sciences. Babbie begins with an overview of the social-science enterprise, discussing both its structure and purpose. He then presents a variety of basic and advanced social-research techniques, including qualitative methods such as participant observation and interviewing and quantitative methods such as statistical analysis. Babbie also includes discussions of research ethics and the practical uses of social research. The two most appealing aspects of the book are Babbie's wonderful sense of humor, which keeps a dense subject area light and manageable, and his careful efforts to present the material so first-time research-methods students can clearly comprehend it. Babbie's book helped me survive my college research-methods course, and it stays on my shelf as an invaluable reference resource.

I've used this text for over ten years for my graduate and upper division undergraduate courses in Research Methods. While there are a number of other introductory methodology texts, I prefer Babbie because the Student Guide that accompanies the text has so many strong features. One of the most important is the experiential nature of many of the problems, questions and especially the exercises that appear at the end of each chapter. The book is voluminous, containing a wealth of material on methodology. The Student Guide provides not only an excellent chapter by chapter review, but a true supplement to the text. Answers to the matching and multiple choice questions that relate to each chapter appear in the back of the Study Guide. The two chapters on survey research are quite good as an introduction to this type of methodology. Additional chapters cover other important topics such as experimentation, field studies, content analysis, and others. The chapter on evaluation research presents a good conceptual overview that can be applied to many different settings. Once again it is important to stress that the Student Study Guide provides such vital support when using the text that I would only recommend using them together. Babbie touches on quantitative analysis, but mostly on basic concepts and fairly simple techniques. While the language is sometimes obtuse, this can be overlooked when examining the book in its entirety. Most of the applications or examples used in the text are from the field of sociology, but an experienced instructor can provide examples from other fields (eg: political science, psychology, public administration, etc.) There are several other computer-based support items. Contact Wadsworth Publishing for specifics.