Building Experiments Testing Social Theory

"Rigorous yet lucid, practical yet profound, this first-rate scholarly contribution is an excellent introduction to the logic of experimental research in the social sciences, ideal for methodology classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Especially noteworthy is the way Willer and Walker anchor experimental sociology and social psychology in social science more broadly, and demonstrate that these disciplines can indeed be sciences in the same sense that physics is a science." William Sims Bainbridge "Readers will enjoy Willer and Walker's informative coverage of the classic sociological experiments such as Bales, Asch and Berger, including a much-needed critique of Milgram's obedience experiments. The authors provide a clear exposition of experimental methods, based on a distinction between theory-driven experiments and empirically driven experiments using the method of difference. They have written the definitive work on experiments in sociology." Randall Collins, University of PennsylvaniaWiller, David is the author of 'Building Experiments Testing Social Theory', published 2007 under ISBN 9780804752459 and ISBN 0804752451.