The practice of social research / Earl Babbie, Chapman University.

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Known as the gold standard for research methods, Babbie's THE PRACTICE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH gives you a definitive guide to research as practiced by social scientists. Combining a straightforward approach with the author's renowned sense of humor, this student-friendly text equips you with the tools and knowledge to apply research concepts as both researcher and consumer. The author emphasizes the process by showing you how to design and construct projects, introducing today's various observation modes and answering critical questions about research methods, such as how to conduct online surveys and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data. The 15th Edition includes the latest General Social Survey findings along with new coverage of the global use of social research, the emerging role of big data, demographic analysis and more. Also available: MindTap digital learning solution.

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• Preface (p. xix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xxv)
• A Letter to Students from This Book (p. xxvii)
• Part 1 An Introduction to Inquiry
• Chapter 1 Human Inquiry and Science (p. 2)
• Introduction (p. 3)
• What do you think? (p. 4)
• Looking for Reality (p. 4)
• Knowledge from Agreement Reality (p. 4)
• Ordinary Human Inquiry (p. 5)
• Tradition (p. 6)
• Authority (p. 6)
• Errors in Inquiry and Some Solutions (p. 7)
• The Foundations of Social Science (p. 8)
• Theory, Not Philosophy or Belief (p. 10)
• Social Regularities (p. 10)
• Aggregates, Not Individuals (p. 12)
• Concepts and Variables (p. 13)
• The Purposes of Social Research (p. 18)
• The Ethics of Human Inquiry (p. 18)
• Some Dialectics of Social Research (p. 19)
• Idiographic and Nomothetic Explanation (p. 19)
• Inductive and Deductive Theory (p. 22)
• Determinism versus Agency (p. 24)
• Qualitative and Quantitative Data (p. 25)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 27)
• The Research Proposal (p. 27)
• Chapter 2 Paradigms, Theory, and Research (p. 29)
• Introduction (p. 30)
• What do you think? (p. 31)
• Some Social Science Paradigms (p. 32)
• Macrotheory and Microtheory (p. 33)
• Early Positivism (p. 33)
• Conflict Paradigm (p. 34)
• Symbolic Interactionism (p. 34)
• Ethnomethodology (p. 35)
• Structural Functionalism (p. 35)
• Feminist Paradigms (p. 37)
• Critical Race Theory (p. 38)
• Rational Objectivity Reconsidered (p. 39)
• Elements of Social Theory (p. 41)
• Two Logical Systems Revisited (p. 43)
• The Traditional Model of Science (p. 43)
• Deduction and Induction Compared (p. 47)
• Deductive Theory Construction (p. 51)
• Getting Started (p. 51)
• Constructing Your Theory (p. 51)
• An Example of Deductive Theory: Distributive Justice (p. 51)
• Inductive Theory Construction (p. 53)
• An Example of Inductive Theory: Why Do People Smoke Marijuana? (p. 54)
• The Links between Theory and Research (p. 55)
• The Importance of Theory in the "Real World" (p. 56)
• Research Ethics and Theory (p. 56)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 57)
• Chapter 3 The Ethics and Politics of Social Research (p. 60)
• Introduction (p. 61)
• What do you think? (p. 62)
• Ethical Issues in Social Research (p. 62)
• Voluntary Participation (p. 63)
• No Harm to the Participants (p. 64)
• Anonymity and Confidentiality (p. 67)
• Deception (p. 70)
• Analysis and Reporting (p. 71)
• Institutional Review Boards (p. 72)
• Professional Codes of Ethics (p. 74)
• Two Ethical Controversies (p. 76)
• Trouble in the Tearoom (p. 77)
• Observing Human Obedience (p. 77)
• The Politics of Social Research (p. 79)
• Objectivity and Ideology (p. 79)
• Politics with a Little "p" (p. 83)
• Politics in Perspective (p. 84)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 85)
• Part 2 The Structuring of Inquiry: Quantitative and Qualitative
• Chapter 4 Research Design (p. 88)
• Introduction (p. 89)
• What do you think? (p. 90)
• Three Purposes of Research (p. 90)
• Exploration (p. 91)
• Description (p. 91)
• Explanation (p. 92)
• Idiographic Explanation (p. 92)
• The Logic of Nomothetic Explanation (p. 93)
• Criteria for Nomothetic Causality (p. 94)
• Nomothetic Causal Analysis and Hypothesis Testing (p. 95)
• False Criteria for Nomothetic Causality (p. 96)
• Necessary and Sufficient Causes (p. 96)
• Units of Analysis (p. 97)
• Individuals (p. 99)
• Groups (p. 99)
• Organizations (p. 100)
• Social Interaction (p. 100)
• Social Artifacts (p. 100)
• Units of Analysis in Review (p. 102)
• Faulty Reasoning about Units of Analysis: The Ecological Fallacy and Reductionism (p. 102)
• The Time Dimension (p. 105)
• Cross-Sectional Studies (p. 105)
• Longitudinal Studies (p. 106)
• Approximating Longitudinal Studies (p. 109)
• Examples of Research Strategies (p. 111)
• Mixed Modes (p. 112)
• How to Design a Research Project (p. 112)
• Getting Started (p. 114)
• Conceptualization (p. 115)
• Choice of Research Method (p. 115)
• Operationalization (p. 115)
• Population and Sampling (p. 115)
• Observations (p. 116)
• Data Processing (p. 116)
• Analysis (p. 116)
• Application (p. 117)
• Research Design in Review (p. 117)
• The Research Proposal (p. 118)
• Elements of a Research Proposal (p. 118)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 120)
• The Ethics of Research Design (p. 120)
• Chapter 5 Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement (p. 124)
• Introduction (p. 125)
• Measuring Anything That Exists (p. 125)
• What do you think? (p. 126)
• Conceptions, Concepts, and Reality (p. 127)
• Concepts as Constructs (p. 128)
• Conceptualization (p. 129)
• Indicators and Dimensions (p. 130)
• The Interchangeability of Indicators (p. 132)
• Real, Nominal, and Operational Definitions (p. 132)
• Creating Conceptual Order (p. 134)
• An Example of Conceptualization: The Concept of Anomie (p. 135)
• Definitions in Descriptive and Explanatory Studies (p. 137)
• Operationalization Choices (p. 138)
• Range of Variation (p. 138)
• Variations between the Extremes (p. 139)
• A Note on Dimensions (p. 140)
• Defining Variables and Attributes (p. 140)
• Levels of Measurement (p. 141)
• Single or Multiple Indicators (p. 145)
• Some Illustrations of Operationalization Choices (p. 146)
• Operationalization Goes On and On (p. 147)
• Criteria of Measurement Quality (p. 148)
• Precision and Accuracy (p. 148)
• Reliability (p. 148)
• Validity (p. 151)
• Who Decides What's Valid? (p. 153)
• Tension between Reliability and Validity (p. 154)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 155)
• The Ethics of Measurement (p. 155)
• Chapter 6 Index, Scales, and Typologies (p. 158)
• Introduction (p. 159)
• What do you think? (p. 160)
• Indexes versus Scales (p. 160)
• Index Construction (p. 162)
• Item Selection (p. 162)
• Examination of Empirical Relationships (p. 163)
• Index Scoring (p. 168)
• Handling Missing Data (p. 170)
• Index Validation (p. 173)
• The Status of Women: An Illustration of Index Construction (p. 176)
• Scale Construction (p. 177)
• Bogardus Social Distance Scale (p. 177)
• Thurstone Scales (p. 178)
• Likert Scaling (p. 179)
• Semantic Differential (p. 180)
• Guttman Scaling (p. 181)
• Typologies (p. 183)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 185)
• Chapter 7 The Logic of Sampling (p. 187)
• Introduction (p. 188)
• What do you think? (p. 189)
• A Brief History of Sampling (p. 190)
• President Alf Landon (p. 190)
• President Thomas E. Dewey (p. 191)
• Two Types of Sampling Methods (p. 192)
• Nonprobability Sampling (p. 192)
• Reliance on Available Subjects (p. 192)
• Purposive or Judgmental Sampling (p. 193)
• Snowball Sampling (p. 193)
• Quota Sampling (p. 194)
• Selecting Informants (p. 195)
• The Logic and Techniques of Probability Sampling (p. 196)
• Conscious and Subconscious Sampling Bias (p. 197)
• Representativeness and Probability of Selection (p. 198)
• Random Selection (p. 200)
• Probability Theory, Sampling Distributions, and Estimates of Sampling Error (p. 200)
• Populations and Sampling Frames (p. 208)
• Review of Populations and Sampling Frames (p. 212)
• Types of Sampling Designs (p. 212)
• Simple Random Sampling (p. 213)
• Systematic Sampling (p. 215)
• Stratified Sampling (p. 216)
• Implicit Stratification in Systematic Sampling (p. 218)
• Illustration: Sampling University Students (p. 218)
• Sample Modification (p. 218)
• Multistage Cluster Sampling (p. 219)
• Multistage Designs and Sampling Error (p. 220)
• Stratification in Multistage Cluster Sampling (p. 221)
• Probability Proportionate to Size (PPS) Sampling (p. 222)
• Disproportionate Sampling and Weighting (p. 223)
• Probabiiiiy Sampling In Review (p. 225)
• The Ethics of Sampling (p. 225)
• What do You think?...Revisiied (p. 226)
• Part 3 Modes of Observation
• Chapter 8 Experiments (p. 228)
• Introduction (p. 229)
• Topics Appropriate for Experiments (p. 229)
• What do you think? (p. 230)
• The Classical Experiment (p. 230)
• Independent and Dependent Variables (p. 230)
• Pretesting and Posttesting (p. 231)
• Experimental and Control Groups (p. 232)
• The Double-Blind Experiment (p. 233)
• Selecting Subject? (p. 234)
• Probability Sampling (p. 234)
• Randomization (p. 235)
• Matching (p. 235)
• Matching or Randomization? (p. 236)
• Variations on Experimental Design (p. 237)
• Preexperimental Research Designs (p. 237)
• Validity Issues in Experimental Research (p. 238)
• Examples of Experimentation (p. 242)
• Web-Based Experiments (p. 244)
• "Natural" Experiments (p. 244)
• Strengths and Weaknesses of the Experimental Method (p. 246)
• Ethics and Experiments (p. 246)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 247)
• Chapter 9 Survey Research (p. 249)
• Introduction (p. 250)
• Topics Appropriate for Survey Research (p. 250)
• What do you think? (p. 251)
• Guidelines for Asking Question (p. 251)
• Choose Appropriate Question Forms (p. 252)
• Make Items Clear (p. 253)
• Avoid Double-Barreled Questions (p. 253)
• Respondents Must Be Competent to Answer (p. 253)
• Respondents Must Be Willing to Answer (p. 254)
• Questions Should Be Relevant (p. 254)
• Short Items Are Best (p. 254)
• Avoid Negative Items (p. 254)
• Avoid Biased Items and Terms (p. 255)
• Questionnaire Construction (p. 256)
• General Questionnaire Format (p. 256)
• Formats for Respondents (p. 256)
• Contingency Questions (p. 257)
• Matrix Questions (p. 258)
• Ordering Items in a Questionnaire (p. 259)
• Questionnaire Instructions (p. 259)
• Pretesting the Questionnaire (p. 260)
• A Sample Questionnaire (p. 260)
• Self-Administered Questionnaires (p. 263)
• Mail Distribution and Return (p. 263)
• Monitoring Returns (p. 264)
• Follow-up Mailings (p. 265)
• Response Rates (p. 265)
• Compensation for Respondents (p. 266)
• A Case Study (p. 267)
• Interview Surveys (p. 268)
• The Role of the Survey Interviewer (p. 268)
• General Guidelines for Survey Interviewing (p. 269)
• Coordination and Control (p. 271)
• Telephone Surveys (p. 273)
• Positive and Negative Factors (p. 273)
• Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) (p. 274)
• Response Rates in Interview Surveys (p. 275)
• Online Surveys (p. 275)
• Online Devices (p. 276)
• Instrument Design (p. 277)
• Improving Response Rates (p. 278)
• Mixed-Mode Surveys (p. 279)
• Comparison of the Different Survey Methods (p. 280)
• Strengths and Weaknesses of Survey Research (p. 281)
• Secondary Analysis (p. 283)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 286)
• Ethics and Survey Research (p. 286)
• Chapter 10 Qualitative Field Research (p. 289)
• Introduction (p. 290)
• What do you think? (p. 291)
• Topics Appropriate for Field Research (p. 291)
• Special Considerations in Qualitative Field Research (p. 294)
• The Various Roles of the Observer (p. 295)
• Relations to Subjects (p. 296)
• Some Qualitative Field Research Paradigms (p. 299)
• Naturalism (p. 299)
• Ethnomethodology (p. 301)
• Grounded Theory (p. 302)
• Case Studies and the Extended Case Method (p. 305)
• Institutional Ethnography (p. 307)
• Participatory Action Research (p. 308)
• Conducting Qualitative Field Research (p. 311)
• Preparing for the Field (p. 311)
• Qualitative Interviewing (p. 313)
• Focus Groups (p. 316)
• Recording Observations (p. 318)
• Strengths and Weaknesses of Qualitative Field Research (p. 320)
• Validity (p. 321)
• Reliability (p. 322)
• Ethics in Qualitative Field Research (p. 322)
• What do you thrnk?...Revisited (p. 323)
• Chapter 11 Unobtrusive Research (p. 325)
• Introduction (p. 326)
• What do you think? (p. 327)
• Content Analysis (p. 327)
• Topics Appropriate for Content Analysis (p. 327)
• Sampling in Content Analysis (p. 328)
• Coding in Content Analysis (p. 332)
• Illustrations of Content Analysis (p. 336)
• Strengths and Weaknesses of Content Analysis (p. 338)
• Analyzing Existing Statistics (p. 338)
• Durkheim's Study of Suicide (p. 339)
• The Consequences of Globalization (p. 340)
• Units of Analysis (p. 341)
• Problems of Validity (p. 341)
• Problems of Reliability (p. 342)
• Sources of Existing Statistics (p. 343)
• Comparative and Historical Research (p. 345)
• Examples of Comparative and Historical Research (p. 345)
• Sources of Comparative and Historical Data (p. 348)
• Analytic Techniques (p. 349)
• Unobtrusive Online Research (p. 351)
• Ethics and Unobtrusive Measures (p. 352)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 353)
• Chapter 12 Evaluation Research (p. 355)
• Introduction (p. 356)
• What do you think? (p. 357)
• Topics Appropriate for Evaluation Research (p. 358)
• Formulating the Problem: Issues of Measurement (p. 360)
• Specifying Outcomes (p. 361)
• Measuring Experimental Contexts (p. 362)
• Specifying Interventions (p. 363)
• Specifying the Population (p. 364)
• New versus Existing Measures (p. 364)
• Operationalizing Success/Failure (p. 364)
• Types of Evaluation Research Designs (p. 365)
• Experimental Designs (p. 365)
• Quasi-Experimental Designs (p. 366)
• Qualitative Evaluations (p. 371)
• Logistical Problems (p. 372)
• Use of Research Results (p. 373)
• Social Indicators Research (p. 379)
• The Death Penalty and Deterrence (p. 380)
• Computer Simulation (p. 380)
• Ethics and Evaluation Research (p. 381)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 382)
• Part 4 Analysis of Data: Quantitative and Qualitative
• Chapter 13 Qualitative Data Analysis (p. 384)
• Introduction (p. 385)
• Linking Theory and Analysis (p. 385)
• What do you think? (p. 386)
• Discovering Patterns (p. 386)
• Grounded Theory Method (p. 387)
• Semiotics (p. 388)
• Conversation Analysis (p. 390)
• Qualitative Data Processing (p. 390)
• Coding (p. 391)
• Memoing (p. 394)
• Concept Mapping (p. 395)
• Computer Programs for Qualitative Data (p. 397)
• QDA Programs (p. 397)
• Leviticus as Seen through Qualrus (p. 398)
• NVivo (p. 401)
• The Qualitative Analysis of Quantitative Data (p. 408)
• Evaluating the Quality of Qualitative Research (p. 410)
• Ethics and Qualitative Data Analysis (p. 412)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 413)
• Chapter 14 Quantitative Data Analysis (p. 415)
• Introduction (p. 416)
• Quantification of Data (p. 416)
• What do you think? (p. 417)
• Developing Code Categories (p. 417)
• Codebook Construction (p. 419)
• Data Entry (p. 420)
• Univariate Analysis (p. 421)
• Distributions (p. 421)
• Central Tendency (p. 422)
• Dispersion (p. 425)
• Continuous and Discrete Variables (p. 426)
• Detail versus Manageability (p. 426)
• Subgroup Comparisons (p. 426)
• "Collapsing" Response Categories (p. 427)
• Handling "Don't Knows" (p. 427)
• Numerical Descriptions in Qualitative Research (p. 428)
• Bivariate Analysis (p. 429)
• Percentaging a Table (p. 430)
• Constructing and Reading Bivariate Tables (p. 432)
• Introduction to Multivariate Analysis (p. 433)
• Sociological Diagnostics (p. 434)
• Ethics and Quantitative Data Analysis (p. 436)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 437)
• Chapter 15 The Logic of Multivariate Analysis (p. 439)
• Introduction (p. 440)
• What do you think? (p. 441)
• The Origins of the Elaboration Model (p. 441)
• The Elaboration Paradigm (p. 445)
• Replication (p. 446)
• Explanation (p. 447)
• Interpretation (p. 448)
• Specification (p. 449)
• Refinements to the Paradigm (p. 450)
• Elaboration and Ex Post Facto Hypothesizing (p. 453)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 455)
• Chapter 16 Social Statistics (p. 457)
• Introduction (p. 458)
• Descriptive Statistics (p. 458)
• Data Reduction (p. 458)
• What do you think? (p. 459)
• Measures of Association (p. 459)
• Regression Analysis (p. 463)
• Inferential Statistics (p. 467)
• Univariate Inferences (p. 467)
• Tests of Statistical Significance (p. 468)
• The Logic of Statistical Significance (p. 469)
• Chi Square (p. 473)
• t-Test (p. 474)
• Some Words of Caution (p. 476)
• Other Multivariate Techniques (p. 477)
• Path Analysis (p. 477)
• Time-Series Analysis (p. 479)
• Factor Analysis (p. 480)
• Analysis of Variance (p. 482)
• Log-Linear Models (p. 484)
• Odds-Ratio Analysis (p. 485)
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (p. 485)
• Demographic Analyses (p. 486)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 489)
• Chapter 17 Reading and Writing Social Research (p. 491)
• Introduction (p. 492)
• Reading Social Research (p. 492)
• Organizing a Review of the Literature (p. 492)
• What do you think? (p. 493)
• Reading Journals versus Books (p. 493)
• Evaluation of Research Reports (p. 495)
• Using the Internet Wisely (p. 499)
• Writing Social Research (p. 505)
• Some Basic Considerations (p. 506)
• Organization of the Report (p. 507)
• Guidelines for Reporting Analyses (p. 511)
• Going Public (p. 511)
• The Ethics of Reading and Writing Social Research (p. 512)
• What do you think?...Revisited (p. 513)
• Appendixes
• A Using the Library (p. 516)
• B Random Numbers (p. 523)
• C Distribution of Chi Square (p. 525)
• D Normal Curve Areas (p. 527)
• E Estimated Sampling Error (p. 528)
• Glossary (p. 529)
• Bibliography (p. 540)
• Index (p. 555)