Social Research Methods by Example

Yasemin Besen-Cassino is Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University, where she is also Chair of the Department. She is the author of The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple, 2018) and Consuming Work: Youth Labor in America (Temple, 2014), and is currently Editor of the journal Contemporary Sociology. Dan Cassino is Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Executive Director of university’s FDU Poll. His research and published writing concentrates on political communication, political cognition, and the socio-political consequences of men’s gender identities. He is the author of Fox News & American Politics: How One Channel Shapes American Politics and Society (Routledge, 2016).

Bessin-Cassino and Cassino's text offers a very accessible guide designed to teach students how to execute the basic elements of a quality research project. At a moment when good social science research is sorely needed, this text provides a valuable tool.Karen A. Cerulo Professor of Sociology, Rutgers UniversitySocial Research Methods by Example is a guide to social scientists’ stable of research methods, but it is also much more. This work serves to engage the reader in the experience of social inquiry, starting from that indispensable moment of curiosity when we ask ourselves questions like, "What difference could the place where we go to vote possibly make in whom we vote for?" Or, "For newly-hired workers learning basic skills needed for their work, what difference will the degree of their ego involvement in the new tasks make in the success of their learning?" In short, the authors start with the happy assumption that their reader is alert, intelligent, and brimming with intellectual curiosity. The best part of all this—a sort of free dividend, if you like—is the overview this work provides to the sheer substantive variety of influential studies that make up the literature of empirical social science. The reader ends up with a grasp of what many of the best social investigators have established in domains as different as human sexuality and voting behavior. Thus anyone who looks here for practical guidance on how to go about social inquiry completes the work with a confident sense of the most intriguing findings and most stimulating challenges that our research tradition has to offer. James B. RuleUniversity of California, Berkeley"Social Research Methods by Example is amongst the most accessible and engaging social science methods books on the market. From coming up with research questions, to identifying appropriate methods to answer them, to engaging existing theory and empirical scholarship, the book is a one-stop shop for social science research expertise."Tristan BridgesAssociate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Preface 1. Introduction 2. Operationalizations and Validity 3. Research Ethics 4. Theory and Paradigms 5. Literature Reviews 6. Ethnographies 7. Interviews and Focus Groups 8. Content Analysis 9. Experiments 10. Field and Quasi-Experiments 11. Designing Survey Items 12. Administering Surveys 13. Quantitative Analysis: Univariate Analysis 14. Quantitative Analysis: Multivariate Analysis References Index