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Explore science by method, field & evidence.

One catalogue of research methods — learn how each one works, when to use it, and what it can’t do.

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8,178 methods11 fields7 method families40 languages
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Entries are compiled from published sources for reference. Verifying the accuracy and suitability of any information for your own use remains your responsibility.

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185 methods in Social SciencesClear
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linguistics

Acceptability Judgment Task

The acceptability judgment task is the modern, quantified successor to informal grammaticality judgments: instead of a single linguist marking a sentence grammatical or not, many participants rate carefully controlled sentences on a graded scale, and the ratings are analyzed statistically. Built on factorial designs wi

3 sources1996
linguistics

Acoustic Phonetic Analysis

Acoustic phonetic analysis is the empirical measurement workflow at the heart of experimental phonetics: it records speech, segments and labels the signal, and extracts quantitative acoustic parameters — the waveform, the spectrogram, fundamental frequency (F0), the formants, intensity, segment duration, and voice onse

3 sources1960
linguistics

Acoustic Phonetics

Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds using instrumentation to measure and analyze sound waves. Pioneered by Peter Ladefoged and Kenneth Stevens, this method uses spectrograms, formant analysis, and waveform measurements to characterize vowels, consonants, and prosodic features wit

3 sources1962
qualitative research

Action Research

Action research is a collaborative research methodology in which researchers work with practitioners and community members to investigate a problem, implement change, and evaluate outcomes, cycling through reflection, action, and learning. Developed by Kurt Lewin (1946), action research bridges research and practice, a

3 sources1946
demography

Age-Period-Cohort Model

The age-period-cohort (APC) model decomposes variation in a vital rate — mortality, incidence, fertility — into three temporal dimensions: the age of individuals, the calendar period of observation, and the birth cohort to which they belong. It is the standard framework for asking whether a trend reflects how risk chan

2 sources1983
archaeology

Amino Acid Racemization

Amino acid racemization (AAR) dating estimates the age of biogenic materials such as mollusc shell, ostrich eggshell, bone, and teeth from the slow chemical conversion of amino acids from one mirror-image form to the other after an organism dies. Living tissue builds proteins almost entirely from left-handed (L) amino

2 sources1997
archaeology

Ancient DNA Analysis

Ancient DNA analysis recovers genetic information from the degraded remains of past organisms — human and animal bones and teeth, and increasingly sediments — and uses it to reconstruct kinship, ancestry, population history, sex, pathogens, and domestication. Because DNA fragments into ever-shorter pieces and accumulat

2 sources2004
linguistics

Apparent-Time Analysis

Apparent-time analysis is the foundational variationist method for detecting language change in progress without waiting for time to pass. Introduced by William Labov in his 1963 study of Martha's Vineyard, it compares the speech of speakers of different ages sampled at a single moment and treats the age dimension as a

3 sources1963
linguistics

Appraisal Analysis

Appraisal analysis is the systematic study of evaluative language — how speakers and writers express feelings, make judgements, value things, take a stance toward other voices, and turn the volume of their evaluations up or down. Developed by James Martin and Peter White within the interpersonal metafunction of systemi

2 sources2005
archaeology

Archaeobotanical Flotation

Archaeobotanical flotation is the standard recovery technique for charred plant macroremains, separating buoyant carbonized seeds, nutshell, and wood charcoal from archaeological sediment by agitating the soil in water. Because carbonized tissue is light and water-repellent, it rises and overflows into a fine mesh as a

2 sources1968
archaeology

Archaeomagnetic Dating

Archaeomagnetic dating uses changes in Earth's magnetic field intensity and direction recorded in fired clay artifacts to determine age. Pioneered by Robert Coe in the 1960s, the method measures the magnetization of pottery and baked clay features, comparing measurements to a master curve of geomagnetic variation throu

2 sources1968
archaeology

Argon-Argon Dating

Argon-argon (40Ar/39Ar) dating is the modern, high-precision successor to conventional potassium-argon dating, in which the parent potassium is measured indirectly by converting it to a measurable argon isotope inside a nuclear reactor. A potassium-bearing sample is irradiated so that potassium-39 transmutes into argon

1 source1999
demography

Arriaga Decomposition

Arriaga decomposition is a demographic technique that breaks down the difference in life expectancy between two life tables — two countries, two time points, or two groups — into the contributions of mortality change at each age. Introduced by Eduardo Arriaga in 1984, it tells the analyst not just that life expectancy

2 sources1984
archaeology

Bayesian Chronological Modeling

Bayesian chronological modeling refines archaeological chronologies by combining the calibrated probability distributions of individual radiocarbon dates with prior archaeological knowledge — most importantly the stratigraphic order of samples and their grouping into phases — within a single Bayesian model. Rather than

2 sources2009
demography

Bongaarts Proximate Determinants

The Bongaarts framework of the proximate determinants of fertility decomposes a population's fertility into a biological maximum reduced by a small set of directly fertility-inhibiting factors: the proportion of women in sexual unions, contraceptive use, induced abortion, and postpartum infecundability. By expressing o

2 sources1978
demography

Brass Growth Balance Method

The Brass growth balance method estimates how complete a country's death registration is when vital statistics are incomplete but a census age distribution exists. Developed by William Brass in 1975, it rests on a simple demographic accounting identity applied above every age: in a stable population the rate at which p

1 source1975
demography

Brass P/F Ratio Method

The Brass P/F ratio method is the foundational technique of indirect fertility estimation, designed to correct fertility levels in populations whose vital registration is incomplete but where a census or survey reports both recent births and lifetime children ever born. It compares F — the period fertility a synthetic

2 sources1964
demography

Brass Relational Logit Model

The Brass relational logit model is a two-parameter system for representing and smoothing a life table by relating it to a chosen standard. Introduced by William Brass in 1971, it transforms the survivorship function with a logit and posits that the logits of any two life tables are linearly related, so that an entire

2 sources1971
qualitative research

Case Study Research

Case study research is an intensive, contextual investigation of a single case (or small number of cases) to explore a phenomenon in depth. Developed systematically by Robert K. Yin (1984) and Robert E. Stake (1995), case study research employs multiple data sources (interviews, observation, documents, artifacts) to pr

3 sources1984
archaeology

Ceramic Petrography

Ceramic petrography analyzes pottery through microscopic examination of thin sections cut from pottery sherds. This method determines clay sources, identifies non-plastic inclusions (temper), and reconstructs pottery production technology. Pioneered by Peter Stimmung and others, ceramic petrography reveals whether pott

3 sources1976
archaeology

Ceramic Thin-Section Petrography

Ceramic thin-section petrography characterizes pottery by examining a wafer-thin slice of a sherd under a polarizing microscope, the same instrument geologists use to study rocks. Because most pottery is made from clay tempered with sand, crushed rock, grog, or shell, the mineral and rock inclusions visible in thin sec

2 sources2013
archaeology

Ceramic Typology

Ceramic typology is the systematic classification of pottery into named groups — wares, types, and varieties — on the basis of shared attributes of form, fabric, surface treatment, decoration, and manufacturing technology. Because pottery is durable, ubiquitous, and changed rapidly in style, it is the archaeologist's m

2 sources1987
archaeology

Chaine Operatoire

The chaine operatoire, or operational sequence, is an analytical framework that reconstructs the entire ordered chain of technical actions and decisions by which a raw material is transformed into a tool, used, maintained, and finally discarded. Originating in the technological anthropology of Andre Leroi-Gourhan, the

2 sources1993
demography

Child-Woman Ratio

The child-woman ratio is the number of young children, usually those under five, per woman of reproductive age in a population. Computed from a single census age-sex distribution, it is the simplest indirect indicator of fertility, designed for settings where birth registration is absent or unreliable. Because young ch

1 source1900
demography

Coale Fertility Indices

Coale's fertility indices are a set of standardized measures — If (overall fertility), Ig (marital fertility), Ih (nonmarital fertility), and Im (proportion married, an index of marriage) — that express a population's childbearing relative to the highest reliably recorded natural-fertility schedule, that of the Hutteri

2 sources1969
demography

Coale-Demeny Model Life Tables

The Coale-Demeny regional model life tables are a system of standard age patterns of mortality, distilled from hundreds of empirical life tables into four regional families — North, South, East, and West — each indexed by a mortality level. Given only a single summary of mortality, such as life expectancy at birth or a

2 sources1966
demography

Coale-McNeil Marriage Model

The Coale-McNeil model is a parametric description of how first marriages are distributed by age. Ansley Coale and Donald McNeil showed in 1972 that the age pattern of first marriage in widely different populations has a common shape, captured by a single standard curve that can be shifted and stretched. Three paramete

2 sources1972
demography

Coale-Trussell Model

The Coale-Trussell model is a two-parameter parametric description of the age pattern of marital fertility, introduced by Ansley Coale and James Trussell in 1974. It expresses observed age-specific marital fertility as a standard natural-fertility schedule scaled by an overall level parameter M and modulated by an age-

2 sources1974
demography

Cohort-Component Projection

Cohort-Component Projection is the standard demographic method for forecasting future population size and age-sex structure by explicitly tracking births, deaths, and migration for each age-sex cohort across discrete time steps. Systematically formalized in the textbook literature by Preston, Heuveline, and Guillot (20

1 source2001
linguistics

Collostructional Analysis

Collostructional analysis is a family of corpus-based methods, introduced by Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Th. Gries in 2003, that quantify the mutual attraction or repulsion between specific words (lexemes) and the grammatical constructions they occur in. Rooted in construction grammar, it treats a construction — su

2 sources2003
linguistics

Comparative Method

The Comparative Method is a foundational technique in historical linguistics for reconstructing ancestral languages and establishing genetic relationships between related languages. Pioneered by Sir William Jones in 1786, it systematically compares phonological, morphological, and lexical features across languages to i

3 sources1786
linguistics

Comparative Method (Historical Linguistics)

The comparative method is the foundational technique of historical linguistics for demonstrating that languages are genetically related and for reconstructing their unattested common ancestor. By systematically comparing cognate words across related languages and uncovering the regular, recurring sound correspondences

3 sources1861
archaeology

Contextual Seriation

Contextual seriation, also called occurrence or sequence seriation, is a relative-dating method that orders discrete archaeological units — typically graves or closed deposits — using only the presence or absence of artifact types within them. Its logic is the lifespan assumption: each type is introduced, used continuo

2 sources1899
linguistics

Corpus Concordance Analysis

Corpus concordance analysis is a core corpus-linguistic technique that retrieves every occurrence of a search word or phrase from a large body of machine-readable text and displays them in keyword-in-context (KWIC) format — the target term aligned in a central column with its surrounding co-text. By reading and sorting

3 sources1991
linguistics

Corpus Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics is the study of language based on large, representative collections of texts (corpora) processed by computer. Pioneered by John Sinclair and others, the method uses statistical analysis, concordancing, and computational tools to examine patterns of actual language use. Corpus linguistics has transfor

3 sources1980
linguistics

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) is a mixed-methods approach that combines the quantitative power of corpus linguistics with the interpretive depth of discourse analysis to investigate how meanings, evaluations, and ideologies are constructed across large collections of text. Pioneered by Alan Partington and co

3 sources2004
archaeology

Cortex Ratio Analysis

Cortex ratio analysis is a quantitative method for assessing whether a lithic assemblage represents the complete reduction of the stone present, or whether pieces have been carried into or out of the deposit. Its insight is that every stone nodule begins entirely covered by a weathered outer rind, or cortex, and that k

2 sources2008
demography

Das Gupta Decomposition

Das Gupta decomposition is the general framework for standardizing and decomposing a difference between summary rates when several factors act at once and more than two populations must be compared. Developed by Prithwis Das Gupta and codified in his 1993 U.S. Census Bureau manual, it generalizes Kitagawa's two-populat

2 sources1993
qualitative research

Data Saturation in Qualitative Research

Data saturation is a foundational principle in qualitative research describing the point at which data collection yields no new themes, codes, or insights—additional data becomes redundant. Introduced by Glaser and Strauss (1967) in their work on grounded theory, saturation guides decisions about sample size and when t

4 sources1967
archaeology

Debitage Analysis

Debitage analysis is the study of flaking debris — the flakes, fragments, and shatter struck off during stone-tool manufacture — to infer how stone was reduced, by what techniques, and to what stage. Because debitage typically outnumbers finished tools many times over at a site, it is the richest and most representativ

2 sources1985
demography

Demographic Balancing Equation

The demographic balancing equation is the fundamental accounting identity of population change: a population at the end of a period equals its size at the start, plus births, minus deaths, plus in-migrants, minus out-migrants. It is the bookkeeping rule that ties together all the components of population dynamics and g

2 sources1976
archaeology

Dental Microwear Texture Analysis

Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) is a method that reconstructs diet and dietary behavior from microscopic wear patterns on the surfaces of teeth. Pioneered by Mark Teaford in the 1980s, DMTA analyzes the three-dimensional texture of wear patterns produced as food is chewed. The method reflects short-term (last

3 sources1988
demography

Dependency Ratio

The age dependency ratio is a simple summary measure of a population's age structure that expresses the number of people in 'dependent' age groups — children and the elderly — relative to those of working age, conventionally per 100 working-age persons. It is split into a youth dependency ratio and an old-age dependenc

1 source1956
linguistics

Dialectometric Distance Analysis

Dialectometry is the quantitative measurement of how linguistically different dialect sites are from one another, aggregated across many features at once. Pioneered by Jean Séguy in the early 1970s and developed by Hans Goebl in Salzburg and John Nerbonne in Groningen, it takes the rich response data of traditional dia

3 sources1971
linguistics

Dialectometry

Dialectometry is a quantitative method for measuring linguistic distances between dialects or languages using objective metrics applied to phonological, lexical, or phonetic data. Pioneered by Jean Seguy in 1973, dialectometry compares word lists, pronunciations, or phonetic transcriptions across speech varieties to ca

3 sources1973
demography

Direct Standardization

Direct standardization is a demographic technique that makes summary rates comparable across populations by applying each population's group-specific rates — most often age-specific death or disease rates — to a single, common standard population structure. The resulting directly standardized rate answers a counterfact

2 sources2001
qualitative research

Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a qualitative research methodology that examines how language, communication, and power shape meaning, identity, and social reality. Developed across linguistics, sociology, and psychology (particularly by Norman Fairclough and Jonathan Potter), discourse analysis goes beyond content to analyze la

3 sources1989
linguistics

Discourse Completion Task

The discourse completion task (DCT) is an elicitation instrument widely used in pragmatics to gather data on how people perform speech acts such as requests, apologies, refusals, and compliments. Respondents read short descriptions of situations and write (or say) what they would utter in each, allowing researchers to

3 sources1989
qualitative research

Document Analysis

Document analysis is a systematic qualitative research method for examining written, visual, or audiovisual sources—such as policy documents, historical records, organizational records, media reports, emails, social media posts, photographs, or videos—to extract meaning, identify patterns, and understand social phenome

4 sources1920
archaeology

Electron Spin Resonance Dating

Electron spin resonance (ESR) dating is a chronometric method that determines the age of bones, teeth, mollusk shells, and sediments by measuring accumulated radiation-induced unpaired electrons. Developed by Michael Aitken in the 1980s, ESR detects free radicals trapped in mineral crystal structures. Unlike luminescen

3 sources1980
linguistics

Electropalatography

Electropalatography (EPG) is an instrumental method for measuring tongue-to-palate contact during speech by using a specially designed artificial palate fitted with an array of sensors. Developed by William John Hardcastle in the 1970s, EPG provides detailed real-time visualization of articulation and has applications

3 sources1974
linguistics

Elicited Imitation Task

In the elicited imitation task, participants listen to spoken sentences — typically of increasing length and grammatical complexity — and repeat each one back. The key insight is that when a sentence exceeds short-term verbatim memory, accurate reproduction is impossible by rote echoing; the listener must comprehend th

2 sources2002
archaeology

Ethnoarchaeology

Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of living societies undertaken specifically to interpret the archaeological record. Archaeologists observe how people in the present make, use, organize, and discard material culture — how potters shape and fire vessels, how households arrange space and dispose of refuse, how

2 sources2001
qualitative research

Ethnographic Research

Ethnographic research is an immersive qualitative methodology in which researchers spend prolonged time in a community, organization, or social setting, combining participant observation, interviews, and document analysis to develop a rich, contextual understanding of a group's beliefs, practices, and social structures

3 sources1920
archaeology

Experimental Archaeology

Experimental archaeology is the controlled replication of past materials, technologies, and behaviors in order to test hypotheses about how the archaeological record was produced. By making stone tools, firing pottery, building and burning structures, butchering with replica implements, or letting bone and refuse decay

2 sources1979
linguistics

Eye-Tracking in Reading

Eye-tracking in reading records where readers look and for how long while they read text naturally, turning the eyes into a continuous index of comprehension. Reading is not a smooth glide but a sequence of brief fixations punctuated by rapid saccades and occasional regressions back to earlier words. By logging this pa

2 sources1998
qualitative research

Focus Group Methodology

Focus group discussions are a qualitative research method in which a trained moderator guides a small group (typically 6–12 participants) through structured or semi-structured discussion of a specific topic or product. Developed by Merton and Lazarsfeld in the 1950s for market research, focus groups are now widely used

4 sources1956
archaeology

Formation Process Analysis

Formation process analysis is the framework for identifying the cultural and natural processes that transform materials from their living, systemic context into the archaeological record we excavate. Developed by Michael Schiffer within behavioral archaeology and codified in his 1987 Formation Processes of the Archaeol

2 sources1987
archaeology

Frequency Seriation

Frequency seriation is a relative-dating technique that orders archaeological assemblages in time by the changing proportions of the artifact types they contain. Its premise is that any cultural type is introduced, gradually becomes popular, peaks, and then declines, so that the relative frequency of a type traces a si

2 sources1962
archaeology

Geometric Morphometrics

Geometric morphometrics is a quantitative analytical method that captures, analyzes, and compares the shapes of biological structures (bones, teeth, pottery) using coordinate data from landmarks and outlines. Developed by Fred Bookstein in the 1990s, GMM provides a rigorous statistical framework for studying shape vari

3 sources1991