Thinking Through Methods: A Social Science Primer

by John Levi Martin

Sociological research is hard enough already—you don’t need to make it even harder by smashing about like a bull in a china shop, not knowing what you’re doing or where you’re heading. Or so says John Levi Martin in this witty, insightful, and desperately needed primer on how to practice rigorous social science. Thinking Through Methods focuses on the practical decisions that you will need to make as a researcher— where the data you are working with comes from and how that data relates to all the possible data you could have gathered.
            This is a user’s guide to sociological research, designed to be used at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Rather than offer mechanical rules and applications, Martin chooses instead to team up with the reader to think through and with methods. He acknowledges that we are human beings—and thus prone to the same cognitive limitations and distortions found in subjects—and proposes ways to compensate for these limitations. Martin also forcefully argues for principled symmetry, contending that bad ethics makes for bad research, and vice versa. Thinking Through Methods is a landmark work—one that students will turn to again and again throughout the course of their sociological research.

Genres: Sociology, Research Methods

280 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2017

Reviews

[delievi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never thought a book could induce such anxiety in me and yet here we are. I think the last few paragraphs of the conclusion sums up the possible reasons for this.

All in all, a very thorough and necessary text. Hopefully I will apply what I’ve learned from it.

[Gabrielle Hillyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very helpful and clear writing on how to approach social ethnographies and other social science. I'm hoping that this book will be revisited in the future to identify new ways of cultivating interest in social science data and results. Very grateful for the read!

[Ana Ljujic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging considering it’s a textbook. Help me get out of the quantitative mindset and opened me up to a qual lens