Social Research Methods

Sigmund Grønmo is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and former Rector (Vice-Chancellor) of the University of Bergen, Norway. He is affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway, and he is a Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, UK. Previously, he was Professor at the Norwegian Business School, Adjunct Professor at the University of Oslo, and Sámi University of Applied Sciences, as well as Research Director and Executive Director at the Norwegian Fund for Market and Distribution Research. He is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and Academiae Europaea, as well as a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He has been a Visiting Professor at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada; Illinois State University, USA; University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; James Cook University, Cairns, Australia; and University of Cambridge, UK. He has also been an Honorary University Professorial Fellow at Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia. He has published numerous books and a large number of journal articles, book chapters and papers, especially within economic sociology, the sociology of time, social network analysis, and social science methodology. He has extensive experience in teaching social research methods at universities and colleges in Norway and several other countries.

Part I: Researching Society
Chapter 1: How and why we study society
Chapter 2: Methods and methodologies in social science
Chapter 3: The ethics and politics of research
Part II: Designing Social Research
Chapter 4: Creating research questions
Chapter 5: Doing a literature review
Chapter 6: Choosing a research design
Chapter 7: Finding sources and data
Chapter 8: Sampling
Part III: Data Collection and Data Quality
Chapter 9: Ethnography and participant observation
Chapter 10: Unstructured interviews and focus groups
Chapter 11: Documentary sources and qualitative content analysis
Chapter 12: Structured observation
Chapter 13: Questionnaires and surveys
Chapter 14: Quantitative content analysis
Chapter 15: Data quality, reliability and validity
Part IV: Data Analysis
Chapter 16: Analysis of qualitative data
Chapter 17: Indexes and distributions
Chapter 18: Relationships between variables
Chapter 19: Statistical generalization
Chapter 20: Mixed methods and combining data
Part V: Asking and Answering Questions in Social Science
Chapter 21: Description, explanation and understanding
Chapter 22: Time, space and level
Chapter 23: Relations, networks and structures
Chapter 24: Big data and computational social science
Part VI: Writing and Presenting Research
Chapter 25: Working with data visualization
Chapter 26: Writing about research