The Craft of Inquiry shows how research emerges from and interacts with theory, helping undergraduate students formulate, reformulate, and pursue their own theoretically-informed research. The author also provides a vocabulary to guide novice researchers through the maze of process. He author suggests that there are three basic explanatory approaches to sociology - multi-variate, interpretive and historical - all of which, on their own, are open to criticism for incompleteness. To fill this gap, he proposes a tripartite model which examines each approach through the lens of the other two, and analyses how these approaches work with and relate to one another.
