While heated arguments between practitioners of qualitative and
quantitative research have begun to test the very integrity of the
social sciences, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba have
produced a farsighted and timely book that promises to sharpen and
strengthen a wide range of research performed in this field. These
leading scholars, each representing diverse academic traditions,
have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal
inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is
either impossible or undesirable. Their book demonstrates that the
same logic of inference underlies both good quantitative and good
qualitative research designs, and their approach applies equally to
each.
Providing precepts intended to stimulate and discipline thought,
the authors explore issues related to framing research questions,
measuring the accuracy of data and uncertainty of empirical
inferences, discovering causal effects, and generally improving
qualitative research. Among the specific topics they address are
interpretation and inference, comparative case studies,
constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables,
the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in
measurement. Mathematical notation is occasionally used to clarify
concepts, but no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics is
assumed. The unified logic of inference that this book explicates
will be enormously useful to qualitative researchers of all
traditions and substantive fields.
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