Thinking Like a Political Scientist: A Practical Guide to Research Methods

by Christopher Howard

Each year, tens of thousands of students who are interested in politics go through a rite of they take a course in research methods. Many find the subject to be boring or confusing, and with good reason. Most of the standard books on research methods fail to highlight the most important concepts and questions. Instead, they brim with dry technical definitions and focus heavily on statistical analysis, slighting other valuable methods. This approach not only dulls potential enjoyment of the course, but prevents students from mastering the skills they need to engage more directly and meaningfully with a wide variety of research.
           
With wit and practical wisdom , Christopher Howard draws on more than a decade of experience teaching research methods to transform a typically dreary subject and teach budding political scientists the critical skills they need to read published research more effectively and produce better research of their own. The first part of the book is devoted to asking three fundamental questions in political What happened? Why? Who cares? In the second section, Howard demonstrates how to answer these questions by choosing an appropriate research design, selecting cases, and working with numbers and written documents as evidence. Drawing on examples from American and comparative politics, international relations, and public policy, Thinking Like a Political Scientist highlights the most common challenges that political scientists routinely face, and each chapter concludes with exercises so that students can practice dealing with those challenges.

Genres: Politics, Research, Writing, Political Science

248 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2017

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this introductory book that is mired with analogies, anecdotes and images to better explain basic statistics. Nonetheless, do not expect to become an expert in statistics - the quantitative part in particular is a bit underdeveloped.

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional. The conversational guide to political science written clearly for the pragmatic student. Howard captures all of the norms of the discipline and its way of approaching research in a way that has rarely been done.

I use the book enthusiastically in my courses and (thus far) it has been well received.

[Liam Arne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers an incredibly fun interpretation of a pretty dull topic: research methods in political science. Howard unpacks some challenging concepts simply and humorously. Highly recommend this book as a political science research methods textbook!

[Kaloyan Kostov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without the author's humor and lively writing style it would have otherwise been impossible to go through such a dry topic like research methods in poli sci. Last chapter gets quite confusing nonetheless.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been teaching American government for a few semesters now in addition to my usual history class, and this book helped me to get a much better understanding of political science as a discipline.

[Martian BT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really good for a book I had to read for class

[Ayah Al Manea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for class.