Introduction: Practice makes perfect -- The empirical approach to political science -- Beginning the research process: Identifying a research topic, developing research questions, and reviewing the literature -- The building blocks of social scientific research: Measurement -- Research design: making causal inferences -- Sampling -- Making empirical observations: direct and indirect observation -- Documentation analysis: using the written record -- Survey research and interviewing -- Making sense of data: first steps -- Statistical inference -- Investigating relationships between two variables -- Multivariate analysis.