SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology

"An excellent guidebook through different approaches to social science measurement, including the all-important route-maps that show us how to get there."
- Roger Jowell, City University

"In this wide-ranging collection of chapters, written by acknowledged experts in their fields, Outhwaite and Turner have brought together material in one volume which will provide an extremely important platform for consideration of the full range of contemporary analytical and methodological issues."
- Charles Crothers, Auckland University of Technology

This is a jewel among methods Handbooks, bringing together a formidable collection of international contributors to comment on every aspect of the various central issues, complications and controversies in the core methodological traditions. It is designed to meet the needs of those disciplinary and nondisciplinary problem-oriented social inquirers for a comprehensive overview of the methodological literature. The text is divided into 7 sections:

• Overviews of methodological approaches in the social sciences
• Cases, comparisons and theory
• Quantification and experiment
• Rationality, complexity and collectivity
• Interpretation, critique and postmodernity
• Discourse construction
• Engagement.

Edited by two leading figures in the field, the Handbook is a landmark work in the field of research methods. More than just a ′cookbook′ that teaches readers how to master techniques, it will give social scientists in all disciplines an appreciation for the full range of methodological debates today, from the quantitative to the qualitative, giving them deeper and sharpen insights into their own research questions. It will generate debate, solutions and a series of questions for researchers to exploit and develop in their research and teaching.

Stephen Turner is Graduate Research Professor. His Ph.D. is from the University of Missouri. His dissertation, Sociological Explanation as Translation , was published in 1980 by Cambridge . He is the author of a number of books in the history and philosophy of social science and statistics, including books on Max Weber, on whom he also edited the Cambridge Companion volume. He is the co-author of the standard one-volume history of American Sociology, The Impossible Science. He has also written extensively in science studies, especially on patronage and the politics and economics of science, and on the concept of practices, including two books, The Social Theory of Practices and Brains//Practices/ Relativism . His Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts, reflects his interest in the problem the political significance of science. Among his other current interests are problems of explaining normativity, especially the conflict between philosophical and social scientific accounts, and issues relating to the implications of cognitive neuroscience for social theory, especially related to the problem of tacit knowledge and mirror neurons. He is also engaged in a large project on the realism of Hans Kelsen and Max Weber and its relevance for contemporary discussions of political theory and law. His most recent book, Explaining the Normative (Polity 2010) is a critique and an alternative to the accounts of “normativity” one finds in philosophers like McDowell, Brandom, Korsgaard, Nagel, and the like. Among his other recent edited books are The SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology, with William Outhwaite, and The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, with Gerard Delanty. He has had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.