When it was first published, DESIGNING SOCIAL INQUIRY, by political scientists Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, at once struck chords of controversy. As it became one of the best-selling methodology books in memory, it continued to spark debate in journal articles, conference panels, and books.

RETHINKING SOCIAL INQUIRY is a major new effort by a broad range of leading scholars to offer a cohesive set of reflections on DESIGNING SOCIAL INQUIRY's quest for common standards drawn from quantitative methodology. While vigorously agreeing to the need for common standards, the essays in RETHINKING SOCIAL INQUIRY argue forcefully that these standards must be drawn from exemplary qualitative research as well as the best quantitative studies. The essays make the case that good social science requires a set of diverse tools for inquiry.

Key additions to the seminal pieces gathered here include an original overview of DESIGNING SOCIAL INQUIRY, a new essay on evaluating causation, and a concluding chapter that draws together basic issues in the ongoing methodological debate.

This book contrasts and studies King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry. I'd read it first; you may never need KKV/DSI though I think that book is also a worthwhile read as well for a social science graduate student or researcher. But you get the essence of KKV in this book. If you are strongly oriented toward KKV, you'll know it soon enough by seeing how they position themselves here and how others criticize them.

There are thoughtful essays throughout, but in my view the best ones are summations by the editors--methodology profs will want to look into using one of the last two essays at minimum in any class. They do a nice job of blunting some of the more theory-laden criticisms of DSI even while being sympathetic to the notion that DSI didn't end qualitative methods as we know them.

The punchline is that rigor is good--no matter what you are doing. The other punchline is that there is no simple path to inference and understanding in the social sciences--it takes a mesh of methods and even then there are issues. We live in a multimethod world and versatile scholars wield quant and qual approaches at different times and often together. The case study isn't dead, and large N is going to have more and more prestige in certain quarters.

Case study and theory oriented readers will want to look at Alexander George's new book written with Andrew Bennett (MIT 2005). It's good stuff--the dissertation meat of any theory-oriented case study method section.