Table of Contents

First paragraph from the Preface:

The idea for a volume that explores the behind-the-scenes details of hands-on empirical social scientific research initially came to me during graduate school when I was grappling with numerous methodological issues and did not find sufficient sources to help me with them. I knew that many other scholars had done interesting and high-quality research relevant to what I was trying to accomplish, yet rarely were the gruesome details of data¹ collection available in the articles and monographs I consulted about these projects for assistance. While countless books exist about research methods, they either tend to be too general for the purposes of helping the researcher figure out the actual steps involved in doing a project, or they lack the first-person perspective especially of junior researchers that would make the advice relevant to somebody embarking on a project at an early stage in their career. It is these shortcomings of the literature that I hoped a volume like this would address. During my junior faculty years, I continued to start new projects with methodological details unfamiliar to me and continued to be frustrated by the lack of guidance available in write-ups of earlier projects by others. Finally, I decided that it was time to rectify the situation and decided to invite a group of talented young scholars to contribute to a volume that would stop the need for so many scholars to reinvent the wheel.

Note

1. I use the word data to refer to any type of empirical material collected about our social world. The word data is not used to indicate any one particular type of information. It is meant as an aggregate term to encompass both qualitative and quantitative material collected using numerous types of methodologies (in-person observations, historical archival research, survey instruments, etc.).