H Russell Bernard, author of the bestselling textbook Research Methods in Anthropology and a world figure in the social sciences, brings to the researcher and the student, the excitement of the research act as never before. The author follows two chapters on the fundamentals of social science and social research by three on preparation, two on interviewing, one on scaling, and two on relative advantages and methods of participative, direct and indirect observation. Six further chapters take the student from the basics of analysis by way of methods for analyzing qualitative data to those for quantitative data analysis, culminating in multivariate analysis, which the author identifies as the key to the most interesting social research of all. Each chapter concludes with key concepts, a summary, exercises and further readings.