"Experiencing Social Research: A Reader" introduces students to the social research process by pairing 16 published research articles with candid interviews with the lead researcher on each study. These interviews bring the research process to life, showing it as a human activity involving choices and constraints, challenges and surprises, frustrations and satisfactions, and collaboration among colleagues.

The articles include a wide range of different methodological approachesqualitative as well as quantitative; applied and theory-driven; critical, interpretive, and positivistic, illustrating nearly every mode of data collection and analysis.

Also, articles represent many different subfields of sociology and related disciplines, such as criminology, family studies, gender, disaster research, mass media, health care, religion, rural sociology, race and ethnicity, social movements, comparative studies, evaluation research, historical analysis, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. "