Political Science Research Methods

by Janet Buttolph Johnson, H.T. Reynolds

Statistics for political scientists. ??

Genres: Political Science, Politics, Nonfiction, Textbooks, Research, Research Methods, Academic

515 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Briana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only needed the first 180 pages of the book, so that's all I read. It's not exactly riveting, but the authors provide a solid overview of basic concepts with helpful examples. The section on Internet searches is obviously dated, but everything else was pretty useful.

[Johnny Bernal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess most people reviewing this aren't really interested in research in Political Science or HAD to read the book (or parts of it), as opposed to WANTED to read it. I read it because I wanted to understand and solidify Research Methods knowledge and the book worked like a charm. At times it goes somewhat deep with the statistical explanations (your average statistical program will simply run the analysis, you don't have to know the details, just the interpretation) and I felt some Qualitative Methods explanations are lacking, but overall this is a good read if you're already somewhat interested in the topic.

[Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truly, 3.5. It was helpful and had good definitions. I liked how they used a series of articles as reference points throughout the book. Read for an Empirical Research Design class in an MPA program.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Textbook is not as dry as you might guess form the oh-so-exciting title, but nonetheless, it is no easy read. For an undergrad English major like me, a book like this is intimidating as hell, but I found out by the end that there really wasn't much I couldn't understand itn it, despite the Greek letters and equations.

It's important to not get frustrated, take it slow and let yourself ask others to help you out when you run into concepts that are not intuitive for you, but the authors do a good job of demystifying some of the more arcane bits. Not recommended for a rollicking good time on a Saturday night, and certainly doesn't qualify as the feel-good book of the year, but it does get the job done for what it sets out to do. One warning: there are many errors in the graphs/illustrations in my copy of this. Hopefully they will be corrected in future editions, but if something doesn't look right to you in a graph, it is probably because it is not right.

[Andrew]

A page turner

[Zällie]

cannot say I enjoyed that, folks. cannot say it.