Changelog

Quantitative Social Science – Core Concepts, Skills, and Stories
(draft manuscript)

Author
Affiliation

John McLevey (he/him)

Sociology, Memorial University

 

This open-access book accompanies the quantitative research methods course I teach at Memorial University. It’s under active development and revision. Chapters are in different stages of development, so some may be a little rougher than others. Feedback is welcome!

Oct 5, 2025

More heavy revisions, this time to break up and expand content on survey methodology, data validation and assessment, remove a lot of measurement theory, and get some scaffolds in place for a slower moving introduction to association and regression. Current plan is to introduce GLMs but keep the emphasis largely descriptive, limiting content on statistical and causal inference.

Sep 20, 2025

Heavy revisions to simplify content and make it more accessible. Clarified purpose of the scraping chapter and better integrated the foundational Python skills. Removed some advanced content.

Sep 15, 2025

Revised the framing of chapters in Modules 2 and 3 to be problem-centered rather than statistical concept-centered. The content on inference will be introduced through data analysis that unfold over multiple chapters, rather than being isolated in a single chapter. To facilitate this change, I’m going to set aside V-DEM and the sentiment/emotion analysis chapters for now and teach that content using survey data (which also reduces cleaning time). The book and course are more coherent and the pacing of skill/concept scaffolding is better.