...This chapter examines two approaches used in social science research: the “causes-of-effects” approach and the “effects-of-causes” approach. The quantitative and qualitative cultures differ in the extent to which and the ways in which they address causes-of-effects and effects-of-causes questions...

...' practices, their language use, and its worldly consequences. The use of words has semantic, pragmatic, and social contexts and exists within networks and ecologies. The chapter considers any key word in social science research to be simultaneously descriptive and evaluative. The languages of social science...

... Activity WF serves run-of-the- mill, meat-and- potatoes social science research and is necessary for empirical research to be about the world, specifically about the phenomena it's intended to be about. The chapter reviews how to amend Activity WF's discontentsso that troubles...

...: quantitative research is grounded in inferential statistics (that is, probability and statistical theory), whereas qualitative research is (often implicitly) rooted in logic and set theory. This chapter discusses the book's approach to characterizing and comparing the two cultures of social science research...

... and discusses major differences between these two traditions that touch nearly every aspect of social science research, including design, goals, causal effects and models, concepts and measurement, data analysis, and case selection. Although focused on the differences between qualitative and quantitative...

..., it discusses the relationship between empirical testing and the proposed scope of theories and suggests that issues of scope raise Fundamental Tradeoffs in social science research, including tradeoffs concerning the tension between generality and parsimony, and between generality and issues of model fit...