- Accounting for Tastes
- Gary S. Becker
- In this lively new collection Gary Becker confronts the problem of preferences and values: how they are formed and how they affect our behavior. He argues that past experiences and social influences form two basic capital stocks: personal and social. He then applies these concepts to assessing the effects of advertising, the power of peer pressure, the nature of addiction, and the function of habits.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Group-Based Modeling of Development
- Daniel S. Nagin
- This book provides a systematic exposition of a group-based statistical method for analyzing longitudinal data in the social and behavioral sciences and in medicine. The methods can be applied to a wide range of data, such as that describing the progression of delinquency and criminality over the life course, changes in income over time, the course of a disease or physiological condition, or the evolution of the socioeconomic status of communities.
- Hardcover 2005
- Identification for Prediction and Decision
- Charles F. Manski
- This book is a full-scale exposition of Manski's new methodology for analyzing empirical questions in the social sciences. He recommends that researchers ask first what can be learned from data alone, and then what can be learned when data are combined with credible weak assumptions. Each chapter juxtaposes developments of methodology with empirical or numerical illustrations.
- Hardcover 2008
- Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys
- Howard Schuman
- Schuman examines the question-answer process that is basic to polls and surveys. This book is less about the substance of wording effects and more about approaches to interpreting the respondent’s world, and how surveys can make that world understandable—though often in ways not anticipated by the researcher.
- Hardcover 2008
- Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences
- Kristin Luker
- Hardcover 2008