Beginning Research in Political Science covers both research design and data analysis and takes a learn-by-doing-approach to guide students through all of the steps needed to complete a research project on one of fourteen potential topics concerning differences in public opinion for important contemporary issues including views on income or gender inequality or support for the death penalty or abortion.

Each chapter builds on the previous chapter with step-by-step instructions for a particular research task, like writing literature reviews, asking questions using dependent and independent variables, developing theory, specifying a research design, and measuring concepts. For data analysis, the text features access to a new dataset called the Dataprac and includes online tutorials to work with three widely used statistical programs, Stata, R Studio, and SPSS. The text also includes a chapter on qualitative analysis so that students can complete brief case studies related to their research topics and a final chapter that encourages students to utilize the newest wave of the World Values Survey to replicate their quantitative analyses.