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Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds. 2004. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 362 pp.
Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett. 2005. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 331 pp.
John Gerring. 2007. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 265 pp.
Gary Goertz. 2006. Social Science Concepts: A User's Guide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 296 pp.
Charles Ragin. 2008. Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 225 pp.
DESIGNING Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, by Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, stands as one of the most widely read books in contemporary political science.1 Nearly all leading political scientists are at least somewhat familiar with it, perhaps knowing the work as simply "KKV," a label that acknowledges (though also possibly reifies) its prominent authors. No one can deny that Designing Social Inquiry has had a large impact in the discipline. It popularized many methodological terms and ideas- descriptive and causal inference, observable implications, unit homogeneity, selection bias, and mean causal effect. And its attempt to codify each step in research design-from formulating questions, to specifying testable theories, to choosing observations, to testing theories, to reporting results-stimulated discussions about nearly all aspects of methodology. The book encouraged methodological self-consciousness in political science, and this legacy can only be seen as beneficial.
Designing Social Inquiry's prominence was also an outgrowth of its authors' provocative central mission: KKV sought to improve qualitative research by using well-established norms drawn from quantitative research, in particular, ideas from regression analysis. Their tacit assumption was that "mainstream" quantitative research2 employs superior methods and that qualitative research could benefit from adopting these methods to the extent possible. Designing Social Inquiry thus encouraged qualitative scholars to follow the principles of a particular quantitative template, one based on the norms of regression analysis. Many believe, however, that this aspect of the book has hindered progress in political science.
This dual legacy of KKV-beneficially increasing methodological awareness while controversially and perhaps unproductively promoting a singular quantitative approach-constitutes an important backdrop for the books under review. Henry E. Brady and David Collier's edited book, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, collects...