Nicholas Hoover Wilson and Damon Mayrl, "After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books in Sociology · May 25, 2024 · 1h 8m

The scientific method that aspiring social scientists are taught in graduate school seems pretty straightforward: you start with a hypothesis, figure our how you’re going to operationalize and measure your variables, pick cases that provide a tough test of your hypothesis, then collect your data, analyze it, and report your findings. However, for comparative-historical social scientists, things are rarely so cut-and-dried: it takes a lot of ‘soaking and poking’ before you can answer relatively straightforward questions like “what is this a case of?” and “what is your dependent variable?”…