Abbott helps social science students discover what questions to ask.
This exciting book is not about habits and the mechanics of doing social
science research, but about habits of thinking that enable students to
use those mechanics in new ways, by coming up with new ideas and
combining them more effectively with old ones.
Abbott organizes his book around general methodological moves, and uses
examples from throughout the social sciences to show how these moves can
open new lines of thinking. In each chapter, he covers several moves and
their reverses (if these exist), discussing particular examples of the
move as well as its logical and theoretical structure. Often he goes on
to propose applications of the move in a wide variety of empirical
settings. The basic aim of Methods of Discovery is to offer readers a
new way of thinking about directions for their research and new ways to
imagine information relevant to their research problems.
Methods of Discovery is part of the Contemporary Societies series.