Hi instructors! Thanks for choosing (or considering) this book!
This is not a typical methods textbook. I pay particular attention to methods in context – understanding what tools to use when, what various techniques and tools are good (and not good) for, how to literally talk about these things in the context of an empirical paper. The intended audience is first-time empirical paper authors: primarily undergrads, but also master’s students and PhD students in a scope and methods or dissertation-planning seminar. The grad students were unforeseen when I wrote the book in 2012-13.
This incredibly wide range of users made for hard decisions. I’ve generally sided with the undergraduate learners in the level of detail I’ve provided, but the second edition includes more in-text citations to the methodological literature and more footnotes about debates and conventions that advanced users may need to be aware of. I’ve also added more Web Extras, bonus articles available here on the website, that meet the needs of advanced users. To further support undergraduate learners, this website’s chapter pages also include vocab flashcards and brief comprehension quizzes.
A collection of instructor resources are available on Cambridge University Press’s official website. Instructors may sign up for verified access to these materials. These include:
- a fully updated Instructor’s Manual complete with chapter summaries, teaching ideas and resources, mapping of 1st to 2nd edition content, additional references and – new to this edition – a reproducible in-class writing prompt for every chapter
- new PowerPoint slide decks for every chapter summarizing the chapter content (note: these are not full lectures)
- slides with just the figures and tables
- student reading guides for Jane Sumner’s The Cost of Doing Politics: How Partisanship and Public Opinion Shape Corporate Influence.
Sumner’s book is unique in that it’s written by a knowledgeable methodologist with an explicit eye to pedagogical use. It pays an incredible amount of attention to detail in developing its concepts and theory, articulating both observable implications of the theory and of falsifiers/alternative explanations, and presenting the results of the analysis in very student-friendly ways. Moreover, it explicitly hypothesizes about a chain of events that lead from the cause to the outcome and tests each of these using a mix of quantitative data and qualitative evidence, demonstrating how to mix evidence types and use quant in a process-oriented manner. It would be a great companion to this book for those whose course structure includes recitations or discussion sections. Your Cambridge textbook rep can help you bundle these titles for more student savings.
The student quizzes on this website are designed to be quick knowledge checks, not comprehensive reviews. Technical barriers prevent me from making these assignable or trackable on the ERW site’s platform. Instructors who want to assign the quizzes can email me from their professional email addresses for the quiz question file and then create their own quizzes in their LMS. This quiz file functions in lieu of a test bank.