One more messy page of links to interesting stuff on methods.

The list comes with a heavy, personal bias towards political science and research in health policy (not to be confused with medical research). Please report broken links as soon as you notice them, so that I can fetch the article using Google’s cache or the Internet Archive.

Contents

• Reading papers
• Research
  • Qualitative research
  • Quantitative research
  • Lexical analysis
• Writing research papers
  • Presenting papers
  • Publishing
  • Quoting rules and styles
  • Writing literature reviews
  • Writing research proposals

Social Surveys

D. de Vaus, Surveys in Social Research, 5th edition, London, Routledge, 2002.

The 1995 edition is even funny at moments (try the question list on top of page 85).

A. N. Oppenheim, Questionnaire Design, Interviewing and Attitude Measurement, 2nd edition, London, Continuum, 1992.

The book is brilliantly written and covers a wide scope of techniques.

D. L. Streiner and G. R. Norman, Health Measurement Scales. A Practical Guide to their Development and Use, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

The book focuses on scaling methods for health research, but can be used in other policy contexts.

Research Design

N. Blaikie, Designing Social Research, Oxford, Polity Press, 2000.

G. King, R. O. Keohane, S. Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994.

The authors aim at uniting quanti- and quali- research. They pretty much end up in abolishing non formalized qualitative research in the end, though.

Everyday practice

The following references are valuable guides for fieldwork and the daily stuff that social scientists deal with.

H. Becker, Tools of the trade.

The classic.

N. Gilbert (ed.), From Postgraduate to Social Scientist, London, Sage, 2006.

An excellent collection of essays

N. Gilbert (ed.), Researching Social Life, 2001. Nice collection.

Reading papers

By Trisha Greenhalgh, from her How to read a paper series published in the BMJ between July and September 1997:

• The Medline database
• Statistics for the non-statistician: I: Different types of data need different statistical tests and II: “Significant” relations and their pitfalls
• The Basics of Evidence Based Medicine
• Getting your bearings (deciding what the paper is about)
• Assessing the methodological quality of published papers
• Papers that… report drug trials, report diagnostic or screening tests (correction), tell you what things cost (economic analyses), go beyond numbers (qualitative research), summarise other papers (systematic reviews and meta-analyses)

More:

• Timothy Burke, Staying Afloat: Some Scattered Suggestions on Reading in College.

Research

This one may be slightly over-ambitious:

• Gary King, How to Think

Quantitative research

• Marie-France Cristofari, Bilan des sources quantitatives dans le champ de la santé et de l’itinéraire professionnel, rapport de recherche CEE, 03/11, 2003.

Lexical analysis

Laurence Bardin, L’analyse de contenu.

Exposé : livret, texte, résumé.

Gilles Bastin, Note sur la méthode Alceste, Melissa, ENS Cachan.

Alceste est très utilisé en France (pas à l’étranger, où c’est plutôt NUD*IST qui revient souvent).

Writing research papers

• Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Timothy Burke, Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay.

Gary King on writing academic stuff (with a political science focus):

• How to Write; How to Write a Research Paper
• Writing a Political Science Essay
• The Six Geniuses of Essay Writing (also published by APSA as Battling the Six Evil Geniuses of Essay Writing)
• How to Write a Book Review

From the San Francisco Edit newsletters:

• Focusing on Your Central Message
• Ten Steps to Writing an Effective Abstract
• Eight Steps to Developing an Effective Outline
• Twelve Steps to Developing an Effective First Draft

Presenting papers

• Matthew O. Jackson, Notes on Presenting a Paper

Publishing

• Gary King, Publication, Publication, PS: Political Science & Politics, 39(1), 2006, p. 119-125.
• Gary King, How to Review an Article Manuscript.

Quoting rules and styles

• Gordon Harvey (from the Harvard University Expository Writing Program): Writing with Sources, A Guide for Harvard Students
• The Chicago Manual of Style

Writing literature reviews

• I vaguely remember an article from PS: Political Science & Politics that gave a simple method to go through a literature review (as applies to political ad social sciences).
• Asian Institute of Technology Language Center, Writing up Research: Using the Literature
• Nicholas Mays, Christopher Pope, Jennie Popay, Systematically reviewing qualitative and quantitative evidence to inform management and policy-making in the health field, Journal of Health Services Research and Policy, 10(3) suppl. 1, 2005, p. 6-20.

Writing research proposals

• Social Science Research Council, The Art of Writing Proposals: Some Candid Suggestions for Applicants to Social Science Research Council Competitions