Meeting a crucial need for graduate students and newly minted researchers, this innovative text provides hands-on tools for generating ideas and translating them into formal theories. It is illustrated with numerous practical examples drawn from multiple social science disciplines and research settings. The authors offer clear guidance for defining constructs, thinking through relationships and processes that link constructs, and deriving new theoretical models (or building on existing ones) based on those relationships. Step by step, they show readers how to use causal analysis, mathematical modeling, simulations, and grounded and emergent approaches to theory construction. A chapter on writing about theories contains invaluable advice on crafting effective papers and grant applications.
Useful pedagogical features in every chapter include:
*Application exercises and concept exercises.
*Lists of key terms and engaging topical boxes.
*Annotated suggestions for further reading.
- ISBN10 1282489976
- ISBN13 9781282489974
- Publish Date 1 January 2009
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 21 April 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Guilford Publications
- Edition Annotated edition
- Format eBook
- Pages 391
- Language English