This highly accessible book provides a basic introduction to the nature of research questions and methods of empirical research in political science. It describes the cooperative process, as well as the logic of empirical measurement and analysis of observations, in the conception and pursuit of a research project. Emphasizing the design of interesting research questions and basic problems of measurement and data analysis, the book relies more on intuitive understanding than on formal development.

W. Phillips Shively wrote this book in 1970, when he was an assistant professor at Yale University. In teaching a number of sections of Introduction to Research to undergraduates there, he had found that the students benefited from an introduction that emphasized the internal logic of research methods and the collective, cooperative nature of the research process. He could not find a book that presented things in this way at a sufficiently elementary level to be readily accessible by undergraduates. And so he wrote The Craft of Political Research.