Designing Social Inquiry

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Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research is a 1994 book written by Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba that lays out guidelines for conducting qualitative research. The central thesis of the book is that qualitative and quantitative research share the same "logic of inference" (p. 3). KKV, as it is known, is considered a major breakthrough in elucidating the ways by which quantitative principles could improve the rigor of qualititative reseach.

According to KKV, a strong research design requires both qualitative and quantitative research, a research question that poses an important and real question that will contribute to the base of knowledge about this particular subject, and a literature review that develops this question through at least twenty years of literature, from which hypothesis (theory-driven) are then drawn. Data that is collected should be operationalized so that the next researcher can come along and develop the same study and achieve similar results. While gathering data the researcher should consider the observable implications of the theory in an effort to explain as much of the data as posssible. This is in addition to examining the causal mechanisms that connect one variable to another.