Howard S. Becker Tricks of the trade

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Designed to help students learn how to think about research projects, this guide offers suggestions which cover four broad areas of social science: the creation of the imagery to guide research; methods of sampling to generate maximum variety in the data; the development of concepts to organize findings; and the use of logical methods to explore systematically the implications of what is found.

The advice ranges from simple tricks such as changing an interview question from Why? to How? (as a way of getting people to talk without asking for a justification) to more technical tricks such as how to manipulate truth tables.

Drawing from a variety of fields such as art history, anthropology, sociology, literature and philosophy, the author ranges from James Agee to Ludwig Wittgenstein, to find the common principles which lie behind good social science work, principles that apply to both quantitative and qualitative research.