Customer Reviews

Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards

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This book contrasts and studies King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry. I'd read it first; you may never need KKV/DSI though I think that book is also a worthwhile read as well for a social science graduate student or researcher. But you get the essence of KKV in this book. If you are strongly oriented toward KKV, you'll know it soon enough by seeing how they position themselves here and how others criticize them.

There are thoughtful essays throughout, but in my view the best ones are summations by the editors--methodology profs will want to look into using one of the last two essays at minimum in any class. They do a nice job of blunting some of the more theory-laden criticisms of DSI even while being sympathetic to the notion that DSI didn't end qualitative methods as we know them.

The punchline is that rigor is good--no matter what you are doing. The other punchline is that there is no simple path to inference and understanding in the social sciences--it takes a mesh of methods and even then there are issues. We live in a multimethod world and versatile scholars wield quant and qual approaches at different times and often together. The case study isn't dead, and large N is going to have more and more prestige in certain quarters.

Case study and theory oriented readers will want to look at Alexander George's new book written with Andrew Bennett (MIT 2005). It's good stuff--the dissertation meat of any theory-oriented case study method section.

King, Keohane and Verba's book "Designing Social Inquiry" has been the bane of soft science graduate students for over a decade. "Rethinking Social Inquiry" is a much better and much clearer explanation of liberal arts scientific study. You shouldn't read one without the other.

If you are reading King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry for class (or if you are assigning it for your students to read) some - but probably not all - of the chapters in this volume are a necessary companion. KKV remains a controversial perspective on qualitative research and should obviously not be read as the definitive view, Rethinking Social Inquiry attempts to find strengths and weaknesses in the text and reflects the subsequent methodological debates that the original text inspired. If KKV is off your radar (aka you are not a social scientist) or not relevant to your interests or work, however, this book is probably not a necessary read; if you are concerned about methodology - quantitative, qualitative, or interpretive - it's worth the purchase.