Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: An introduction to inquiry: Science and social research: Introduction -- Looking for reality -- The foundations of social science -- The purposes of social research -- Some dialectics of social research -- The research proposal -- Social inquiry: Ethics and politics: Introduction -- Ethical issues in social research -- Two ethical controversies -- The politics of social research -- Inquiry, theory, and paradigms: Introduction -- Some social science paradigms -- Elements of social theory -- Two logical systems revisited -- Deductive theory construction -- Inductive theory construction -- The links between theory and research -- Research ethics and theory -- The structuring of inquiry: Quantitative and qualitative: Purpose and design of research projects: Introduction -- Three purposes of research -- Idiographic explanation -- Nomothetic explanation -- Necessary and sufficient causes -- Units of analysis -- The time dimension -- How to design a research project -- The research proposal -- Sampling logic: Introduction -- A brief history of sampling -- Nonprobability sampling -- The theory and logic of probability sampling -- Populations and sampling frames -- Types of sampling designs -- Multistage cluster sampling -- Probability sampling in review -- The ethics of sampling -- From concept to measurement: Introduction -- Measuring anything that exists -- Conceptualization -- Definitions in descriptive and explanatory studies -- Operationalization choices -- Criteria of measurement quality -- The ethics of measurement -- Typologies, Indexes, and scales: Introduction -- Indexes versus scales -- Index construction -- Scale construction -- Typologies -- Modes of observation: Quantitative and qualitative: Surveys: Introduction -- Topics appropriate for survey research -- Guidelines for asking questions -- Questionnaire construction -- Self-administered questionnaires -- Interview surveys -- Telephone surveys -- Online surveys -- Comparison of the different survey methods -- Strengths and weaknesses of survey research -- Secondary analysis -- Ethics and survey research -- Experiments and experimentation: Introduction -- Topics appropriate for experiments -- The classical experiment -- Selecting subjects -- Variations on experimental design -- An illustration of experimentation -- Alternative experimental settings -- Strengths and weaknesses of the experimental method -- Ethics and experiments -- Unobtrusive measures: Introduction -- Content analysis -- Analyzing existing statistics -- Comparative and historical research -- Ethics and unobtrusive measures -- Paradigms, methods, and ethics of qualitative field research: Introduction -- Topics appropriate for field research -- Special considerations in qualitative field research -- Some qualitative field research paradigms -- Conducting qualitative field research -- Strengths and weaknesses of qualitative field research -- Ethics and qualitative field research -- Evaluation research: Types, methods, and issues: Introduction -- Topics appropriate for evaluation research -- Formulating the problem: Issues of measurement -- Types of evaluation research designs -- The social context -- Social indicators research -- Ethics and evaluation research -- Analysis of data: Quantitative and qualitative: Analyzing qualitative data: Introduction -- Linking theory and analysis -- Qualitative data processing -- Computer software for qualitative data analysis -- The qualitative analysis of quantitative data -- Evaluating the quality of qualitative research -- Ethics and qualitative data analysis -- Analyzing quantitative data: Introduction -- Quantification of data -- Univariate analysis -- Subgroup comparisons -- Bivariatte analysis -- Introduction to multivariate analysis -- Sociological diagnostics -- Ethics and quantitative data analysis -- Origins and paradigm of the elaboration model: Introduction -- The origins of the elaboration model -- The elaboration paradigm -- Elaboration and ex post facto -- Hypothesizing -- Methods of statistical analysis: Introduction -- Descriptive statistics -- Inferential statistics -- Other multivariate techniques -- Consuming and creating social research: Introduction -- Reading social research -- Using the internet wisely -- Writing social research -- The ethics of reading and social research.

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A straightforward, comprehensive, and approachable guide to research as practiced by social scientists, the Thirteenth Edition of Babbie's "gold-standard" text gives you the tools you need to apply research concepts practically, as both a researcher and a consumer. Babbie emphasizes the process by showing you how to design and construct projects, introducing the various observation modes in use today, and answering critical questions about research methods--such as how to conduct online surveys and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data --