Preface: Learning to Think Like a Social Scientist

Summary

MOTIVATION FOR WRITING THIS BOOK

This book has been created as a one-stop introduction to quantitative empirical social science for busy students. It originated as lecture notes from a one-semester class taught by five professors, with three weeks each of history, economics, sociology, political science, and psychology. Rather than emphasizing common features of all social sciences, we pull out examples that demonstrate the distinctive ways of working within each area. What does it mean to think like an economist? Or like a sociologist, political scientist, psychologist, or historian? We hope that students, in reading this book and working through its examples, will develop some social science literacy in these different ways of thinking, which in turn should improve their understanding of their individual areas of study.

We focus on quantitative models and methods for two reasons. First, quantitative skills are difficult and are in demand, both within and outside academia. Hence, students should be motivated to learn the relevance of quantitative ideas in the study of society. Second, by centering on quantitative approaches, we give a common theme to the book so that students can see how a core group of ideas is applied in different ways to different problems.

MATHEMATICAL LEVEL

This book is not limited to students with a statistical or methodological focus; we think that all social science students would benefit from it, and we are careful to place technical terms in social science contexts.