The Essentials Of Political Analysis

"Pollock and Edwards explain the nuts-and-bolts of research design and data analysis in a clear and concise style. The Essential of Political Analysis is an intuitive introduction to complex material, replete with examples from the political science literature that add relevance to statistical concepts. This text offers students an excellent balance between the technical and the practical." —Francis Neely, San Francisco State University Gain the skills you need to conduct political analysis and critically assess statistical research. In this Sixth Edition of The Essentials of Political Science, bestselling authors Philip H. Pollock III and Barry C. Edwards build students’ analytic abilities and develop their statistical reasoning with new data, fresh exercises, and accessible examples. This brief, accessible guide walks students through the essentials—measuring concepts, formulating and testing hypotheses, describing variables—while using key terms, chapter-opening objectives, over 80 tables and figures, and practical exercises to get them using and applying their new skills. Using SPSS, STATA or R? Discounted package deals available with Philip H. Pollock’s companion workbooks. . Give your students the SAGE edge! SAGE edge offers a robust online environment featuring an impressive array of free tools and resources for review, study, and further exploration, keeping both instructors and students on the cutting edge of teaching and learning.

This Fifth Edition of The Essentials of Political Analysis equips students with the skills to conduct political analysis and critically assess statistical research. Bestselling author Philip H. Pollock III builds students’ analytic abilities and develops their statistical reasoning with new data, fresh exercises, and engaging examples. This accessible introduction to the essential elements of political analysis walks students through the basics—measuring concepts, describing variables, formulating and testing hypotheses, controlling for alternative explanations, and interpreting graphic displays, and nearly 50 practical exercises motivate them to use their new skills with confidence.

Gain the skills you need to conduct political analysis and critically assess statistical research. In this Sixth Edition of The Essentials of Political Science, bestselling authors Philip H. Pollock III and Barry C. Edwards build your analytic abilities and develop your statistical reasoning with new data, fresh exercises, and accessible examples. This brief, accessible guide walks you through the essentials—measuring concepts, formulating and testing hypotheses, describing variables—while using key terms, chapter-opening objectives, over 80 tables and figures, and practical exercises to get you using and applying your new skills.

This fully updated third edition makes the prospect of methods courses for students a lot less daunting. Featuring a range of pedagogical features including chapter exercises and over eighty tables and figures, the book clearly explains the ins and outs of political analysis.

Teach your students to conduct political research using R, the open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. An R Companion to Political Analysis offers the same easy-to-use and effective style as the best-selling SPSS and Stata Companions. The all-new Second Edition includes new and revised exercises and datasets showing students how to analyze research-quality data to learn descriptive statistics, data transformations, bivariate analysis (cross-tabulations and mean comparisons), controlled comparisons, statistical inference, linear correlation and regression, dummy variables and interaction effects, and logistic regression. The clear explanation and instruction is accompanied by annotated and labeled screen shots and end-of-chapter exercises to help students apply what they have learned. "Students will love this book, as will their teachers." – Courtney Brown, Emory University

This book presents the evolution of the field of foreign policy analysis and explains the theories that have structured research in this area over the last 50 years. It provides the essentials of emerging theoretical trends, data and methodological pitfalls and major case-studies and is designed to be a key entry point for graduate students, upper-level undergraduates and scholars into the discipline. The volume features an eclectic panorama of different conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches to foreign political analysis, focusing on different models of analysis such as two-level game analysis, bureaucratic politics, strategic culture, cybernetics, poliheuristic analysis, cognitive mapping, gender studies, groupthink and the systemic sources of foreign policy. The authors also clarify conceptual notions such as doctrines, ideologies and national interest, through the lenses of foreign policy analysis.

This is a shrink-wrapped, discounted package containing Philip Pollock's popular, student-friendly political science methods text and new student workbook using Stata. Workbook contains a data CD.

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behavior. It shows that 'context matters' in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. By showcasing scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account.

This text starts by explaining the fundamental goal of good political science research—the ability to answer interesting and important questions by generating valid inferences about political phenomena. Before the text even discusses the process of developing a research question, the authors introduce the reader to what it means to make an inference and the different challenges that social scientists face when confronting this task. Only with this ultimate goal in mind will students be able to ask appropriate questions, conduct fruitful literature reviews, select and execute the proper research design, and critically evaluate the work of others. The authors' primary goal is to teach students to critically evaluate their own research designs and others’ and analyze the extent to which they overcome the classic challenges to making inference: internal and external validity concerns, omitted variable bias, endogeneity, measurement, sampling, and case selection errors, and poor research questions or theory. As such, students will not only be better able to conduct political science research, but they will also be more savvy consumers of the constant flow of causal assertions that they confront in scholarship, in the media, and in conversations with others. Three themes run through Barakso, Sabet, and Schaffner’s text: minimizing classic research problems to making valid inferences, effective presentation of research results, and the nonlinear nature of the research process. Throughout their academic years and later in their professional careers, students will need to effectively convey various bits of information. Presentation skills gleaned from this text will benefit students for a lifetime, whether they continue in academia or in a professional career. Several distinctive features make this book noteworthy: A common set of examples threaded throughout the text give students a common ground across chapters and expose them to a broad range of subfields in the discipline. Box features throughout the book illustrate the nonlinear, "non-textbook" reality of research, demonstrate the often false inferences and poor social science in the way the popular press covers politics, and encourage students to think about ethical issues at various stages of the research process.

In Philip H. Pollock's An IBM SPSS® Companion to Political Analysis, students dive headfirst into actual political data and work with a software tool that prepares them for future political science research. Students learn by doing with fresh guided examples, new annotated screenshots, step-by-step instructions, and exercises that reflect current scholarly debates in American political behavior and comparative politics. Compatible with all releases of SPSS (12.0 and later), the all-new Fifth Edition includes 53 new or revised exercises. Two new datasets (NES 2012 and GSS 2012) and two revised datasets (on the 50 states and on 167 countries of the world) feature an expanded number of variables to provide greater latitude for performing original analysis.