ENGLISH

Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research

Book information

Publisher
Princeton University Press
Year
1994
ISBN
0691034702, 9780691034706
LCC
H61 .K5437 1994
Google Books ID
A7VFF-JR3b8C
Open Library ID
OL1428083M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
913 kB (935240 bytes)
Pages
259\259
Orientation
yes
Scanned
no
Time added
2012-02-04 16:00:00

Description

While heated arguments between practitioners of qualitative and quantitative research have begun to test the very integrity of the social sciences, this monograph outlines a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. The book demonstrates that the same logic of inference underlies both good quantitative and qualitative research designs. Providing precepts intended to stimulate and discipline thought, the authors explore issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and the uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects and generally improving qualitative research. Among the specific topics addressed are interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, the construction of 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 should be useful to qualitative researchers i

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