Social Research Methods

H. Russell Bernard is director of the Institute for Social Science Research at Arizona State University and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology of the University of Florida. He is a cultural anthropologist specializing in technology and social change, language revitalization, and social network analysis. Bernard has done research or taught at universities in the United States, Mexico, Greece, Japan, and Germany. He is a former editor of Human Organization and the American Anthropologist and is the founder and editor of the journal Field Methods. Bernard’s books include Research Methods in Anthropology and Social Research Methods (both with Amber Wutich); Analyzing Qualitative Data (with Gery Ryan and Amber Wutich); and Native Ethnography (with Jesús Salinas Pedraza). Bernard was the 2003 recipient of the Franz Boas Award and the 2024 recipient of the Conrad Arensberg Award from the American Anthropological Association and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

“The main strength of this text is coverage of both quantitative and qualitative methodology from a broad range of fields. The examples are often my students’ favorite thing to discuss in class.”

• Part I: Background to ResearchChapter 1. About Social ScienceChapter 2. The Foundations of Social ResearchChapter 3. Preparing for ResearchPart II: Research DesignChapter 4. Research Design: Experiments and Experimental ThinkingChapter 5. Sampling: The BasicsChapter 6. Sampling TheoryChapter 7. Nonprobability SamplingPart III: Data CollectionChapter 8. Interviewing I: Unstructured and SemistructuredChapter 9. Interviewing II: QuestionnairesChapter 10. Interviewing III: Relational Data - Domains and NetworksChapter 11. Scales and ScalingChapter 12: Participant ObservationChapter 13. Field Notes and Database ManagementChapter 14: Direct and Indirect ObservationPart IV Data AnalysisChapter 15: Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative AnalysisChapter 16: Analyzing Cultural Domains and Proximity MatricesChapter 17. Analyzing Qualitative Data I: Applying Logic to TextChapter 18. Analyzing Qualitative Data II: Grammar Beyond the SentenceChapter 19. Analyzing Qualitative Data III: Grounded Theory and Content AnalysisChapter 20. Univariate AnalysisChapter 21. Bivariate Analysis: Testing RelationsChapter 22. Multivariate AnalysisAppendix A: Table of Areas under a Normal CurveAppendix B: Student’s t DistributionAppendix C: Chi-Square Distribution TableAppendix D: F Table for the .05 Level of SignificanceAppendix E: Resources for Social Researchers