Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia Around the Year 1000

by Stephen Van Evera

Book Overview

Stephen Van Evera greeted new graduate students at MIT with a commonsense introduction to qualitative methods in the social sciences. His helpful hints, always warmly received, grew from a handful of memos to an underground classic primer. That primer evolved into a book of how-to information about graduate study, which is essential reading for graduate students and undergraduates in political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, and history...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080148457X
• ISBN13: 9780801484575
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Practical guide to research/writing (and the arrows work)

Van Evera's book is simple, to be sure, but not simplistic; a prior reviewer's gibes at the notion of flow-charting a theory, with arrows, are a bit off the mark. As the reviewer notes, a theory designates a causal relationship. If so -- no matter what its other "good" points (parsimony, explanatory reach, etc) -- you can draw that causal relationship between the various independent variables and the dependent variable they help to explain. You can even draw it with arrows.In general this book is recommended for 1st or 2nd year political science graduate students, and useful for advanced undergraduates (who will only care about the 1st 100 pages or so). It is clear and eminently practical. Other reviewers are right to imply there is little here in the way of philosophy of science in the broadest sense. But that merely makes this book a complement, not a substitute, to more esoteric explorations of the topic.