Hi! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood methods geek! Welcome to my book!
If you’re reading this page, you’ve probably been assigned my book in class. Yay! That means you’re developing some critical skills in thinking and reasoning about the world around you, and you’ve probably been assigned an empirical paper or research design to write this term. I’m not going to lie and tell you this book makes it all easy peasy; it doesn’t. What this book does do is give you a toolbox for thinking & asking questions & actually writing about these things.
A little bit of background on me: I was an inveterate, unmistakable nerd with a penchant for data and evidence from the time I was small. (The stories my mother can tell….) I’m definitely on the autistic spectrum and probably ADHD too. Throw in some other mental health stuff and my brain is a very cluttered place. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a piece of Velcro that’s been through the dryer too many times. It’s thoroughly loaded with bits of fluff from who only knows where, and good luck at ever getting them out.
I grew up near Pittsburgh, PA (hop in the Ohio at the Pointe and float downstream; we’re on the right bank of the 5th bridge). That means, naturally, that I’m a Steelers fan. (My husband says it’s something in the water there; probably rust, in his opinion.) I did my undergrad at American University in Washington, DC, and my grad work (MA/PhD) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Now, something you need to understand is that AU is a place that puts the politics in political science; Michigan is quite literally the place that put the science into it. The contrast could not have been more stark to a 22 year old me. I struggled until I finally started to figure out the logic of what we were doing; I credit the autism for making me overthink and try to deconstruct so much of the logic of what was going on. What were the things everyone else ‘knew’ that I was supposed to figure out? What was everyone else doing that I needed to do too?
The result of all that overthinking is a very unique perspective on the conduct and writing up of research. No one bothered to tell me (or any of us, frankly) how to do things; we were expected to pick most of it up by osmosis (especially the writing). I HAD to think it all through and find the patterns and realize where the implicit bits were. I literally couldn’t move forward without it. What I’ve tried to do in this book is bring some of that ‘no one told me and I had to figure it out’ to the table. I’m telling YOU so you don’t have to do the mental work I did. You get to short-cut right to the end of that learning process.
I spent a couple years teaching research methods with the handouts (originally called Prof. Powner’s Purely Pragmatic ‘Pirical Paper Planner, or P7 for short) that emerged from this overthinking. I had everyone from first-year undergrads to PhD students. Then, while I was teaching at my undergrad alma mater in DC, I met a guy on Match.com. Turned out he was a military officer, so when we decided to marry, my plans to get a permanent faculty post went out the window. (He loved his job. Mine gave me heartburn and depression, so the decision wasn’t hard.) After stops in southern Virginia, where I taught for a year at Christopher Newport University, San Antonio, and southern Illinois (40 min east of St Louis), we’re now in central South Carolina. We’ve got 2 beagles, Tommy and Lady, who are spoiled rotten.
Say hi!
Got a question or a comment about the book? Something that wasn’t clear – or that was particularly clear? Your instructor is your best place for content questions, but I’m interested in the things that do and don’t work for readers. Please feel free to use the contact form below to let me know. You can also use it, after your project is done, to send me a Peer Pointer idea for the 3rd edition. I can’t guarantee I’ll use it, but I’ll reach out for explicit permission if I do.
Most years I do attend the Midwest Political Science Association conference, and I make a point to go to as many of the undergraduate poster sessions as I can. If you attend, I’d love to meet – use the contact form below and I’ll arrange a couple coffee get togethers.