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| Preface | |
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| Doing Research | |
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| Social Research | |
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| Types of political research | |
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| The research mix | |
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| Evaluating different types of research | |
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| Ethics of Political Research | |
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| Political Theories and Research Topics | |
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| Causality and Political Theory | |
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| What Does Good Theory Look Like? | |
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| Example of elegant research: Robert Putnam | |
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| To quantify or not? | |
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| Choosing a Topic | |
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| Engineering research | |
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| Theory-oriented research | |
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| Setting Out a Research Design | |
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| Observations, puzzles, and the construction of theories | |
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| Machiavellian Guide to Developing Research Topics | |
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| Further Discussion | |
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| The Importance of Dimensional Thinking | |
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| English as a Language for Research | |
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| Ordinary language | |
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| The Proper Use of Multidimensional Words | |
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| Example of dimensional analysis | |
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| Further Discussion | |
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| Problems of Measurement: Accuracy | |
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| Reliability | |
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| Reliability as a characteristic of concepts | |
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| Testing the reliability of a measure | |
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| Validity | |
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| Some examples | |
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| Checking for validity | |
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| The Impact of Random and Nonrandom Errors | |
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| The Importance of Accuracy | |
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| Further Discussion | |
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| Problems of Measurement: Precision | |
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| Precision in Measures | |
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| Precision in Measurement | |
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| The innate nature of levels of measurement | |
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| The sin of wasting information | |
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| Enriching the level of precision in measurement | |
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| Examples of enrichment | |
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| Quantifiers and nonquantifiers again | |
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| Further Discussion | |
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| Causal Thinking and the Design of Research | |
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| The Subjective Nature of Causation | |
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| Eliminating Alternative Causal Interpretations | |
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| Summary | |
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| A Few Basics of Research Design | |
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| Designs without a control group | |
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| Use of a control group | |
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| The true experiment | |
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| Designs for Political Research | |
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| Special design problem for policy analysis: regression to the mean | |
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| The Use of Varied Designs and Measures | |
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| Example of Varied Designs and Measures | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Holding a Variable Constant | |
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| Further Discussion | |
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| Introduction to Statistics: Measuring Relationships for Interval Data | |
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| Statistics | |
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| The Importance of Levels of Measurement | |
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| Working with Interval Data | |
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| Regression analysis | |
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| Correlation analysis | |
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| Correlation and regression compared | |
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| The problem of measurement error | |
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| Further Discussion | |
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| Introduction to Statistics: Further Topics on Measurement of Relationships | |
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| Measures of Relationship for Ordinal Data | |
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| Measures of Relationship for Nominal Data | |
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| Dichotomies and regression analysis | |
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| Logit and Probit Analysis | |
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| Multivariate Analysis | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Introduction to Statistics: Inference, or How to Gamble on Your Research | |
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| The Logic of Measuring Significance | |
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| Example of Statistical Inference | |
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| Hypothesis Testing | |
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| The null hypothesis | |
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| Example: x[superscript 2] | |
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| Sampling distributions | |
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| The importance of N | |
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| The problem of independent observations | |
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| Is a Significance Test Always Necessary? | |
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| Polling and Significance Tests | |
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| Uses and Limitations of Statistical Tests | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Further Discussion | |
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| Where Do Theories Come From? | |
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| Selected Bibliography | |
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| Index | |