Highly Commended – Society for Educational Studies Annual Book Prize 2013

The Society for Educational Studies

This book does three important things. It provides a useful account of how the qualitative-quantitative divide in research methods arose and became entrenched, it sets out the various reasons why we need to move beyond this divide, and it offers a vision and a demonstration of how this can be done using an approach that combines a focus on cases with the search for the causes of the social phenomena under investigation. It combines philosophical discussion with empirical illustration in an accessible way that will make readers reconsider their ideas about how to deal with depth and breadth in social research.

Graham Crow, Deputy Director, ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and Professor of Sociology, University of Southampton, UK