Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards

"The new edition of Rethinking Social Inquiry is, quite simply, the best treatise yet on the intersection of qualitative and quantitative methods. The book places causal-process tracing on a new foundation and provides a framework for skeptically evaluating natural experiments. The discussions are conceptually, statistically, and historically rigorous; the examples will have broad appeal."---Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University

"The first edition of Rethinking Social Inquiry was a game-changing contribution that decisively moved the methodological discussion into a post-KKV era. This second edition is the new cutting edge. It retains the key insights from the previous version while advancing major new methodological tools, both qualitative and quantitative. No social scientist can afford to be without this book."---James Mahoney, Northwestern University

"The revised and reorganized edition of this foundational book expertly draws out the complementarities of quantitative and qualitative methods, including an updated debate with King, Keohane, and Verba. New chapters and online exercises yield novel insights into the rigorous use of process tracing and greatly enhance the book's utility and value."---Diana Kapiszewski, University of California, Irvine

"Rethinking Social Inquiry is a breakthrough book. It powerfully makes the case for social inquiry as a rigorous quest for valid causal inference that must fully exploit insights and strengths of both statistical and case-based methods. Brady and Collier and their fellow contributors show the pitfalls of mechanically applying dogmas from `quantitative' or `qualitative' extremes. Shared standards are possible, and researchers using diverse research designs can work together to build illuminating, empirically grounded theories. All political scientists---indeed all social scientists---should read and reflect on this compelling set of arguments."---Theda Skocpol, Harvard University

"King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry aimed at incorporating qualitative research methods into the conceptual framework of quantitative methodology. But was the attempt successful? What is the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods? In this volume, Brady, Collier, and other prominent social scientists address these questions in powerful essays. Everyone interested in research methods, and certainly everyone teaching the subject, will want to read this book."---Christopher H. Achen, Princeton University

Henry E. Brady is Dean of Public Policy and Monroc Deutsch Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently President of the American Political Science Association.
David Collier is Robson Professor of Political Sciene at the University of California, Berkeley.