The Craft of Inquiry

This work is intended to show students at a middle level of acquaintance with sociology, how research emerges from and interacts with theory. It is designed to help students formulate, reformulate and pursue their own theoretically-informed research. In addition, it offers a vocabulary to guide novice researchers through the maze of process. The underlying structure of the text...

This work is intended to show students at a middle level of acquaintance with sociology, how research emerges from and interacts with theory. It is designed to help students formulate, reformulate and pursue their own theoretically-informed research. In addition, it offers a vocabulary to guide novice researchers through the maze of process. The underlying structure of the text is based on the author's suggestion that there are three basic explanatory approaches to sociology - multi-variate, interpretive and historical - all of which, on their own, are open to criticism for incompleteness. To fill this gap, the author proposes a tripartite model which examines each approach through the lens of the other two, and analyzes the way these approaches work with and relate to one another. This book is intended for undergraduate and graduate sociology students in theory and methods courses.

Robert R. Alford, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, City University of New York, Graduate Center.