"This book is a proposed supplementary text that guides social scientists and their students to fully characterize and assess the properties of research designs before they implement them. The book leads readers to answer questions like: - What questions is my study honestly well-equipped to answer? - How do I choose between gathering less data on more units versus more data on fewer units? - If I'm right, how likely is it that my study will change the mind of a committed skeptic? - How sensitive are my findings to my assumptions? These questions are surprisingly tricky to answer even for the most seasoned researchers. A major part of the trouble is that most scholars lack a definition of what constitutes a complete research design. The book will help researchers and students to decide on a method of assessment and then to measure the strength of that research design. The book applies this framework for common social science research designs. The book has four parts: (1) an introduction to the general framework to conceptualize design; (2) a design library of standard design types for researchers to draw from; (3) a set of research principles to guide readers with data gathering, question formation, and analysis; and (4) an extension of the broader use of the approach and framework for researchers, critiques and peer reviewers, and also for research funders. Each chapter is anchored by a narrative theoretical section that are enhanced by interactive R modules to illustrate design tradeoffs. In addition, each chapter includes a "lab," demonstrating how to implement and learn about each design; and exercises that extend the lab using interactive assessment tools. The book can be used independently as a supplemental course book for graduate and advanced graduate students, but is also supported by an online set of R repositories that could be used in conjunction with the book, as well as a piece of web software that allows researchers to assess designs without using the statistical packages"--