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• PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS: WHAT METHODOLOGY IS AND DOES Inference and Warrant in Designing Research Methodology and Social Science Knowledge Testing, Confirming and Falsifying Perspectives on Findings from Social Research PART TWO: DESIGNS: THE MAIN TYPES OF RESEARCH DESIGN Types of Research Design Variable-Oriented Research Designs Case-Based Research Designs Comparative and Case-Oriented Research Designs Concept Formation PART THREE: ACHIEVEMENTS: WHAT RESEARCH MAKES INFERENCES TO Why Ideas about Explanation Matter for Methodology Basic Forms of Explanation Mechanisms, Contexts and Trajectories Warranting Explanations Between-Case and within-Case Strategies Interpretation Warranting Interpretations PART FOUR: SYNTHESIS: COMBINATIONS AND TRADE-OFFS Combining Research Designs Trade-offs in Research Design.
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This book provides a comprehensive, accessible guide to social science methodology. In so doing, it establishes methodology as distinct from both methods and philosophy. Most existing textbooks deal with methods, or sound ways of collecting and analysing data to generate findings. In contrast, this innovative book shows how an understanding of methodology allows us to design research so that findings can be used to answer interesting research questions and to build and test theories. Most important things in social research (e.g., beliefs, institutions, interests, practices and social classes) cannot be observed directly. This book explains how empirical research can nevertheless be designed to make sound inferences about their nature, effects and significance. The authors examine what counts as good description, explanation and interpretation, and how they can be achieved by striking intelligent trade-offs between competing design virtues. Coverage includes: / why methodology matters; / what philosophical arguments show us about inference; / competing virtues of good research design; / purposes of theory, models and frameworks; / forming researchable concepts and typologies; / explaining and interpreting: inferring causation, meaning and significance; and / combining explanation and interpretation. The book is essential reading for new researchers faced with the practical challenge of designing research. Extensive examples and exercises are provided, based on the authors' long experience of teaching methodology to multi-disciplinary groups. Perri 6 is Professor of Social Policy in the Graduate School in the College of Business, Law and Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University. Chris Bellamy is Emeritus Professor of Public Administration in the Graduate School, Nottingham Trent University.
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Abbott helps social science students discover what questions to ask. This exciting book is not about habits and the mechanics of doing social science research, but about habits of thinking that enable students to use those mechanics in new ways, by coming up with new ideas and combining them more effectively with old ones. Abbott organizes his book around general methodological moves, and uses examples from throughout the social sciences to show how these moves can open new lines of thinking. In each chapter, he covers several moves and their reverses (if these exist), discussing particular examples of the move as well as its logical and theoretical structure. Often he goes on to propose applications of the move in a wide variety of empirical settings. The basic aim of Methods of Discovery is to offer readers a new way of thinking about directions for their research and new ways to imagine information relevant to their research problems. Methods of Discovery is part of the Contemporary Societies series.
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• Introduction The Perceptron Linear Autoassociative Memories Linear Heteroassociative Memories Error Backpropagation Useful References.
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Neural networks, adaptive statistical models based on an analogy with the structure of the brain, can be used to estimate the parameters of some population using one (or a few) exemplars at a time. This book introduces readers to the basic models of neural networks and compares and contrasts these models using other statistical models. Through the use of examples that can be computed by hand or with a simple calculator, the authors describe and explain the various models.
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• Prologue; Acknowledgements; Part I; Chapter One; Chapter Two; Chapter Three; Part II; Chapter Four; Chapter Five; Chapter Six; Part III; Chapter Seven; Chapter Eight; Chapter Nine; Epilogue; References; Index

This book tells the story of an intellectual journey with metaphor. It questions the basis of evidence in social research, especially the 21st century fallacies surrounding it. Metaphor itself serves as the story-teller here. As the book shows, social research evidence is hidden deep inside metaphor, and is uncovered by the use of the social research method. Through research we make methodological compromises to ensure our intellectual survival. It also highlights that all truth-values are embodied, paradoxical, metaphorical, and postdisciplinary, and that ethically responsible research is possible only within embodied cognition of a research problem. A researcher's spatiotemporal context converges and diverges across a body cell to the celestial universe, and from all-realist human history to all-forthcoming, over a momentary fee will, as one embodied cognition. Building upon embodiment philosophy, alethic hermeneutics, critical social theory, and ethical intuitivism, the text revisits the epistemology and ontology of evidence and challenges the dualist norms of social research, points to the failings, and flags up directions for researchers who take evidence seriously. It introduces a cognitive methodology in social research that creates a normative balance for an experiential-intuitive approach to ethically responsible social research. It also claims a unique cognitive schema-the prodigal-within-prodigy paradox, which unifies the traditional theory of metaphor and the post-1980s cognitive theory of metaphor, characterised by mutuality in divergence and convergence of research evidence.
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