By Victor Tan Chen, Gabriela León-Pérez, Julie Honnold, and Volkan Aytar

Books | Blog | Media | About Victor

For details about Victor’s other books, go to the Books page. For additional teaching resources, go to the Teaching page.

This free-to-use sociological research methods textbook is Creative Commons-licensed (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). A pilot version of the textbook can currently be read online, with a PDF version and supplementary materials to be available soon.

The Craft of Sociological Research: Principles and Methods of Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Social Science Data was developed with the goal of developing an open educational resource (OER) that makes well-written and engaging methods-training materials available for free to students. The manuscript was written by a team of authors at Virginia Commonwealth University who are all researchers as well as teachers of undergraduate methods courses. Some portions of the text were adapted from existing OER social scientific methods textbooks, and others are original. Our aim is to provide broad but sound coverage of widely used methodologies, giving students the background they need to both evaluate and conduct research. While targeted at undergraduates, the textbook includes optional sections that provide more advanced methodological training. It also features Q&As with prominent sociologists and sidebars on topical issues that social scientific research has helped illuminate. We hope the text is accessible to students with a variety of backgrounds and interests, and to that end we have tried to make the writing lively and clear throughout and provide supplemental online and multimedia resources when possible.

This project was funded with the generous support of the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA), a program of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), and VCU Libraries’ Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative.

Read the Book

The Craft of Sociological Research (free to use)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Using Sociology in Everyday Life
3. The Role of Theory in Research
4. Research Questions
5. Research Design
6. Sampling
7. Measuring the Social World
8. Ethics
9. Ethnography
10. In-Depth Interviews
11. Qualitative Data Analysis
12. Experiments
13. Surveys
14. Quantitative Data Analysis
15. Materials-Based Methods
16. Appendix: Presenting, Writing, and Publishing

Media Archive

To read op-eds and essays about unemployment and economic precarity, visit the Other Writings page. For media interviews and mentions, visit the Media Archive. For academic writings, visit the Papers page. Media professionals can get more information in the Media Kit.

Blog

For updates on the book and my other work, please read and follow my blog (sign-up form below and in top menu).