The Fundamentals of Political Science Research

A very good book, explains the basics in an very easily understandable way

This was required for my class and I honestly thought I was going to hate this book. I ended up renting the book, but will now end up buying the book! It's priceless in terms of conducting political science research and writing political science papers. As a political scientist, this has been immensely useful! It keeps your attention, and makes great use of examples.

Excellent text. Easy to follow extremely informative. The content drew me in, even for a subject that is less than captivating.

I've used this course in my undergrad poli sci research methods course. A solid textbook for an intro undergraduate poli sci course on research methods. Far too basic for students who've previously had any training in econometrics or quant methods. I am not as pleased with the book's discussion of counterfactual causal inference. It offers a fair amount of hand-waving at the issue, and doesn't do much to engage with the Neyman-Rubin causal model, which is both intuitive and now a workhorse in the social sciences. The discussions of theory, research design, and the basic mechanics of regression are much better, and appropriate for a beginner undergraduate audience.

There are points where this book could have been clearer. I was completely new to statistics when I got it and it did a great job of explaining the concepts but not so great of a job at helping me understand the math. In order to understand how to do any of the problems by hand you'll have to go back through the book chapter by chapter to figure out each step if you are like me and forget the steps in math problems fairly quickly.

exelent