This book offers advice to doctoral researchers and graduate and advanced undergraduate students on how to embark on their research. Based on a decade of teaching early-stage researchers in the social sciences at the LSE and other universities, and written with the central problems of beginning researchers in mind, Bob Hanck--eacute--; guides them through the process of thinking about the links between theory, cases and data, and to do so in a way that helps to turn their initialplausible ideas into convincing arguments. This lively book, deliberately jargon-free and with a hands-on, pragmatic.