Intelligent Research Design: A Guide for Beginning Researchers in the Social Sciences

by Bob Hancke

This book offers advice to doctoral researchers and graduate and advanced undergraduate students on how to embark on their research. Based on a decade of teaching early-stage researchers in the social sciences at the LSE and other universities, and written with the central problems of beginning researchers in mind, Bob Hancke guides them through the process of thinking about the links between theory, cases and data, and to do so in a way that helps to turn their initial plausible ideas into convincing arguments. This lively book, deliberately jargon-free and with a hands-on, pragmatic approach to research design, addresses the problems that research students face--or ignore, often at their peril--in the course of their first few years. Its central message is that research is a complex and iterative process in which researchers construct every relevant part of their project with one goal in mind: make a persuasive point. They define the question they ask and the debate they engage, construct their cases and data to answer that question, and write it up as an argument that brings out the strengths of their research design. It addresses such key issues as statistical versus configurational approaches, time in social science research, different types of case studies and comparative research, and a critical approach to data. The Appendix gives tips on presenting and discussing papers, and on crafting research proposals.
"

158 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 2009

Reviews

[Roman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this quite short book the author managed to give more than a couple of good advices on the academic writing, especially methodology. If you are interested in a PhD or preparation of a scientific paper, this is definitely your reading.

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 4 out of 5]

The detail that completely flipped my perspective in Intelligent Research Design: A Guide for Beginning Researchers in the Social Sciences was how much of the big, famous story came down to one overworked clerk who misfiled a document. Bob Hancke clearly dug through the archives, and you feel it in the small stuff, like what people ate, what they argued about, and what they were too scared to say out loud. The pacing dragged a bit in the chapters on politics and treaties, where it turned into alphabet soup of names. Solid pick if you're into the weird human accidents behind the headlines.

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Straight up, Intelligent Research Design is a smarter, meaner take on office life than any motivational poster could handle. Bob Hancke argues that most workplace "culture" is just a way to get people to do unpaid extra work with a smile. I felt like it was solid, mostly because the stories feel too specific to be made up. The section on mandatory fun events got me thinking about every pizza party I've sat through while quietly doing math on my rent. You might think it's a bit cynical, but it definitely forces you to rethink what your company is really asking of you.