Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

The book in your hands has been about four de- cades in the making. It began in the classroom, when I was asked to teach a seminar in survey re- search. Frustrated with the lack of good textbooks on the subject, I began to dream up something I called “A Survey Research Cookbook and Other Fables,” which was published in 1973 with a more sober title: Survey Research Methods.
The book was an immediate success. However, there were few courses limited to survey research. Several instructors around the country asked if “the same guy” could write a more general methods book, and The Practice of Social Research appeared two years later. The latter book has become a fix- ture in social research instruction, with the 11th edition published in 2006. The official Chinese edi- tion was published in Beijing in 2000.
Over the life of this first book, successive revi- sions have been based in large part on sugges- tions, comments, requests, and corrections from my colleagues around the country and, increas- ingly, around the world. Many also requested a shorter book with a more applied orientation.
Whereas the third quarter of the twentieth cen- tury saw a greater emphasis on quantitative, pure research, the century ended with a renaissance of concern for applied sociological research (some- times called sociological practice) and also a re- newed interest in qualitative research. The Basics of Social Research was first published in 1999 in support of these trends. The fourth edition aims at increasing and improving that support.
The book can also be seen as a response to changes in teaching methods and in student de- mographics. In addition to the emphasis on applied research, some alternative teaching formats have called for a shorter book, and student eco- nomics have argued for a paperback. While stan- dard methods courses have continued using The Practice of Social Research, I’ve been delighted to see that the first three editions of Basics seem to have satisfied a substantial group of instructors as well. The fine-tuning in this fourth edition is in- tended to help Basics serve this group even better than before.