Making Sense of the Social World - International Student Edition

The new Sixth Edition of Making Sense of the Social World continues to be an accessible and student-friendly introduction to the variety of social research methods, guiding readers to understand research in their roles as consumers and novice producers of social science.

Known for its concise, casual, and clear writing, its balanced treatment of quantitative and qualitative approaches, and its integrated approach to the fundamentals, the text covers all essential elements of social research methods including validity, causation, experimental and quasi-experimental design, and techniques of analysis.

The authors use a wide variety of examples from formal studies and everyday experiences to illustrate important principles and techniques.

Suitable reading for both novice researchers and more advanced students alike.

A member of the Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) faculty since 1981, Dan Chambliss graduated from New College (Florida) in 1975 and earned Master′s and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University; in 1982 his doctoral thesis received the American Sociological Association’s prize for the best recent dissertation on medical sociology. His research interests are higher education, organizations, social psychology and research methods, while he teaches courses from introductory sociology through senior theses, with an emphasis on social theory, social psychology, and phenomenology. Holder of two previous endowed chairs in recognition of undergraduate teaching, in 2005 Chambliss was named the inaugural holder of the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professorship at Hamilton.    He is the winner of the ASA′s Theory section prize for his work on organizational excellencein his widely-reprinted 1989 article, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Reporton Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” and is author of Champions: The Making of OlympicSwimmers, which was named the 1991 Book of the Year by the U.S. Olympic Committee. His 1996 book, Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses and the Social Organization of Ethics, won theEliot Freidson Prize for the best book of the preceding two years in medical sociology fromthe American Sociological Association. Chambliss is also co-author, with Russell Schutt, ofMaking Sense of the Social World, a research methods textbook currently in a sixth edition, in use at over one hundred colleges and universities in the US and UK. His work has been widely translated in Europe and Asia.  Chambliss is the author with Christopher Takacs, his former student and now a PhD candidateat the University of Chicago, of How College Works, published in February 2014 by HarvardUniversity Press. How College Works has been named recipient of the Press′s Warren andVirginia Stone Prize as the outstanding book of the year on Education and Society.From 2002-2008, Chambliss served as a Commissioner, then Member of the ExecutiveCommittee, of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, overseeing the accreditationof more than 500 colleges and universities in the mid-Atlantic region. He recently served for three years on the governing Council of the American Sociological Association, where he currently serves on the Executive Office and Budget Committee, overseeing management of the Association.In 2018 he received the ASA’s national career prize for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching.Beyond his academic work, Chambliss serves as senior advisor and Research Director forLH&P, a team of management consultants serving senior leadership (C-level) executives in Fortune 50 firms in the US and UK; he specializes in the design and analysis of internal research projects and secondary data. Raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he now resides in Cazenovia, New York.Russell K. Schutt, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston; Clinical Research Scientist I at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and Lecturer (part-time) in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. He completed his BA, MA, and PhD degrees at the University of Illinois at Chicago and his postdoctoral fellowship in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University. In addition to co-authoring The Practice of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice and Fundamentals of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice (with Ronet Bachman), he is the author of Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research and Understanding the Social World: Research Methods for the 21st Century, and co-author of Making Sense of the Social World (with Dan Chambliss), Research Methods in Psychology (with Paul G. Nestor), The Practice of Research in Social Work and Fundamentals of Social Work Research (with Ray Engel), and Research Methods in Education (with Joseph Check), all with SAGE Publications, as well as author of Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness and Organization in a Changing Environment, coeditor of Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society and of The Organizational Response to Social Problems, and coauthor of Responding to the Homeless: Policy and Practice. He has authored and coauthored more than 65 peer-reviewed journal articles as well as many book chapters and research reports on homelessness, mental health, service preferences and satisfaction, organizations, and the sociology of law. His current and most recent research includes a $200,000 National Science Foundation-funded study of the social impact of the pandemic in Boston, with collaborators at the Center for Survey Research (UMass Boston) and Northeastern University, a $3.8 million randomized comparative effectiveness trial of two socially-oriented interventions to improve community functioning among persons diagnosed with serious mental illness, funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with collaborators at the Harvard Medical School, and a $1 million Veterans Health Administration-funded study of peer support with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School  and the VA.  His past research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, the Veterans Health Administration, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Fetzer Institute, and state agencies. Details are available at

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.