Making Sense of the Social World: Methods of Investigation

Congratulations to Daniel F. Chambliss, winner of the ASA Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Prize for 2018.

The new Sixth Edition of Making Sense of the Social World continues to be an unusually accessible and student-friendly introduction to the variety of social research methods, guiding undergraduate readers to understand research in their roles as consumers and novice producers of social science. Known for its concise, casual, and clear writing, its balanced treatment of quantitative and qualitative approaches, and its integrated approach to the fundamentals, the text has much to offer both novice researchers and more advanced students alike. The authors use a wide variety of examples from formal studies and everyday experiences to illustrate important principles and techniques.

New to this Edition

• Failure (and success) of pre-election polls in the 2016 Presidential election 
• The use and abuse of data from social media such as Facebook and Twitter
• When does research on underprivileged populations become cultural appropriation? (based on the controversy over Alice Goffman’s ethnographic studies in Philadelphia)
• The debate over inclusion of U.S. citizenship questions on the 2020 Census
• The growth of new video techniques by researchers, and dramatically expanded use of web-based surveys (both by professionals and by students)
• Addition of material on methods widely used by student researchers, such as content analysis and “grounded theory” ethnography 
• New vignettes on Research That Matters, Research in the News, and Careers and Research, to enhance the relevance of the book to undergraduates

Daniel F. Chambliss, PhD, is the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he has taught since 1981. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1982; later that year, his thesis research received the American Sociological Association’s Medical Sociology Dissertation Prize. In 1988, he published the book Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers, which received the Book of the Year Prize from the U.S. Olympic Committee. In 1989, he received the American Sociology Association (ASA)’s Theory Prize for work on organizational excellence based on his swimming research. Recipient of both Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, he published his second book, Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses, and the Social Organization of Ethics, in 1996; for that work, he was awarded the ASA’s Elliot Freidson Prize in Medical Sociology. In 2014, Harvard University Press published his book, How College Works, coauthored with his former student Christopher G. Takacs. His research and teaching interests include organizational analysis, higher education, social theory, and comparative research methods.

Russell K. Schutt, PhD, is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, a Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School (Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center), and a Research Associate at the Edith Nourse Rogers Veterans Administration Medical Center. He completed his BA, MA, and PhD (1977) at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University (1977–1979). His other books include Understanding the Social World: Research Methods for the 21^st Century, Fundamentals of Social Work Research (with Ray Engel), Making Sense of the Social World (with Dan Chambliss), and Research Methods in Psychology (with Paul G. Nestor)―all with SAGE Publications, as well as Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness (Harvard University Press) and Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (coedited with Larry J. Seidman and Matcheri S. Keshavan, Harvard University Press). Most of his peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters focus on the effect of social context on cognition, satisfaction, functioning, and recidivism; the orientations of service recipients and of service and criminal justice personnel; and the organization of health and social services. His research has been supported by the Veterans Health Administration, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Fetzer Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the University of Massachusetts, and other state and local funders.