I had not looked at the Palgrave Key Concepts series before, so when offered this book for review I assumed it was an introductory handbook or a study skills guide for students. There are hundreds of these. In the heady days of sociology's major expansion in the mid‐1970s, compiling them was a major academic industry. I even helped write one (Summerfield et al., 1982), although, in self‐defence I should emphasise that it was given free to all our students, and if the web had been in existence at the time we would certainly have tried to make it free to everybody. Nor, on the other hand, is this a guide to statistical methods. There are hundreds of those too. In fact a considerable number of guides to “research methodology” are devoted entirely to statistics. Seeking impartial professional advice on definitions of statistical terms, I asked Brian Everitt, emeritus professor of biometrics at King's College London which he would recommend. He unblushingly suggested that the best single information source available was the Cambridge Dictionary of Statistics (Everitt, 2006) (RR 2007/92) but, under pressure, gave grudging approval to both A Dictionary of Statistics (Upton and Cook, 2006) (RR 2007/140) and The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms (Dodge, 2003) from the extensive list I offered him.
What this is however is a dictionary or annotated glossary – a set of brief definitions, ranging from one line to a couple of pages in length, of terms used by social research workers. As such it is clearly designed as a guide for people reading the results of social research, rather than a methodological handbook for people about to embark on research projects of their own. This should give it a much wider audience. Many social science degrees require students to undertake some sort of research project. Students need guidance on doing these, so there is a steady market for small methodological handbooks. We are all, however, consumers of social research. Every newspaper, no matter how trashy and trivial‐minded is likely to quote research results. Understanding them is an important part of being an effective citizen, so it behoves us all to be aware of what social researchers are talking about. This is made difficult by the fact that the social research vocabulary is completely uncontrolled. Natural scientists do, it is true, occasionally re‐invent the wheel, sometimes accidentally by not being properly aware of the existing literature, and sometimes in the hope that by calling it a “circular transportation support module” they can lay claim to some form of originality. Psychologists are particularly prone to making “discoveries” that are little more than new terms for old concepts. Social scientists put all other competitors in the shade however. This book has to be full of synonyms – Gomm claims that he found 22 different ways of saying that consciousness is organized – and, even worse, it has to define terms that have been used by different researchers to mean completely different things.
As a dictionary this book is obviously aimed at a very crowded market. It faces a remarkable range of competitors.. My own former library contains a fair selection, but we are fortunate in having the London School of Economics just up the road. Their library contains a staggering collection of guides to social research and its terminology. Perhaps the closest competitors to this book are The A‐Z of Social Research (Miller and Brewer, 2003), The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought (Outhwaite, 2006) (RR 2007/70), A New Dictionary of the Social Sciences (Mitchell, 2007), and The Sage Dictionary of Social Research Methods (Jupp, 2006). I also noticed the Dictionary of Statistics and Methodology (Vogt, 2005), largely devoted to social research methods, and, on the a‐statistical side, the Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry (Schwandt, 2001). Broadening the theme slightly, almost every publisher seems to have produced at least one general dictionary of sociology or of the social sciences, largely devoted to defining terms used in social science research. Some publishers have several to their credit (I wonder what the marketing staff at Sage would say, if asked to recommend just one dictionary covering social science methodology).
Faced with this monstrous heap of reference literature we have to ask not merely if this is a useful book, which it undoubtedly is, but whether it stands out from its competitors. I have to say that, by and large, it does not, it blends in very well with them. The definitions are clear, concise and, to the best of my belief, accurate. They assume very little in the way of previous knowledge, so the book is eminently suitable for beginners – I would expect a first‐year social sciences undergraduate to be able to use it. Many, though not all, of the entries have references for further reading. These appear to be well chosen and accessible. Unusually, a considerable number of these references are to freely available web sites. Those that I sampled all seem to work. Most dictionaries in this field emanate from the USA and are aimed exclusively at American readers. This, by contrast, is British in origin, and so includes definitions specific to Britain such as Mass Observation or the British Crime Survey.
On the down side, there are no etymologies. Terms simply receive bald definitions so the book is a bit lacking in a sense of history. It is not always clear from the text what is a cross‐reference and what is merely a highlighted synonym. Thus, for example, under the heading Normal Distribution there is a list of terms in bold type, including Bell Curve and Z Curve. Bell Curve is regarded as a synonym and merely refers back to the main entry, but Z Curve receives its own entry, with just over a page of detailed definition and a suggestion for further reading. There are a few oddities, where definitions are lacking or incomplete. Thus, for example, in view of the complex interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences it might have been worth including a definition of philosophy, but the entry here merely says “Introductions to the lives and thought of philosophers […] can usually be found at […] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy www.iep.utm.edu”, with no further discussion at all.
This brings us round to the biggest problem faced by this book and its competitors. The new generation of students, at which this book is aimed, have grown up with the internet. All the terms which I sampled have definitions freely available. Most of these are, of course, from Wikipedia. There are many things which I dislike about Wikipedia. I would be much happier with it if it was not anonymous. I cannot see why entries should not include the names of their originators and of the last persons to edit them. For contentious topics Wikipedia can be grossly misleading. For non‐contentious definitions however, it can be very useful. In the long term I cannot see a continuing market for commercial resources like this book when virtually everything in it is available for free to readers who are more accustomed to clicking around a screen than to working in alphabetical order through a book.
In the short term then, this is a useful little student reference book that can be recommended to undergraduates both in sociology and in a range of related disciplines. University social science libraries will probably find that they have adequate definitions of all the terms in here already, but may still find this a handy addition to the armoury. Public libraries may also find it worth considering, though small general handbooks on social research methods may be more useful for their readers.
