Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia Around the Year 1000

By Stephen Van Evera

Book Overview

Stephen Van Evera greeted new graduate students at MIT with a commonsense introduction to qualitative methods in the social sciences. His helpful hints, always warmly received, grew from a handful of memos to an underground classic primer. That primer evolved into a book of how-to information about graduate study, which is essential reading for graduate students and undergraduates in political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, and history - and for their advisers.

-How should we frame, assess, and apply theories in the social sciences? "I am unpersuaded by the view that the prime rules of scientific method should differ between hard science and social science. Science is science."

-A section on case studies shows novices the ropes.

-Van Evera contends the realm of dissertations is often defined too narrowly "Making and testing theories are not the only games in town.... If everyone makes and tests theories but no one ever uses them, then what are they for?"

-In "Helpful Hints on Writing a Political Science Ph.D. Dissertation," Van Evera focuses on presentation, and on broader issues of academic strategy and tactics.

-Van Evera asks how political scientists should work together as a community. "All institutions and professions that face weak accountability need inner ethical rudders that define their obligations in order to stay on course."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080148457X
• ISBN13: 9780801484575
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Practical guide to research/writing (and the arrows work)

Van Evera's book is simple, to be sure, but not simplistic; a prior reviewer's gibes at the notion of flow-charting a theory, with arrows, are a bit off the mark. As the reviewer notes, a theory designates a causal relationship. If so -- no matter what its other "good" points (parsimony, explanatory reach, etc) -- you can draw that causal relationship between the various independent variables and the dependent variable they help to explain. You can even draw it with arrows.In general this book is recommended for 1st or 2nd year political science graduate students, and useful for advanced undergraduates (who will only care about the 1st 100 pages or so). It is clear and eminently practical. Other reviewers are right to imply there is little here in the way of philosophy of science in the broadest sense. But that merely makes this book a complement, not a substitute, to more esoteric explorations of the topic.