Acknowledgements
Our textbook draws on the work of a community of scholars, educators, students, and experts in open education, graphic design, publishing, and beyond. We are immensely grateful to everyone involved. We began working on this project at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and we would not have been able to reach this milestone of publication without the collective work and support of these individuals.
First, this textbook would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) and VCU Libraries. We are indebted to Jessica Kirschner, VIVA’s digital publishing coordinator and formerly the open educational resources (OER) librarian at VCU Libraries. In those roles and as our project’s open educational resources, publishing, and copyright consultant, Jessica provided invaluable guidance and thoughtfully shepherded the book from an idea in a grant proposal to a fully realized publication. We would also like to acknowledge Stephanie Westcott, VIVA’s open and sustainable learning coordinator, for her unflagging support of the project.
We are grateful to Bizhan Khodabandeh, an assistant professor at VCU’s Robertson School of Media and Culture, for his creativity and vision. As the textbook’s graphic designer, Bizhan created the visual design for the textbook and all the figures in the chapters. We deeply appreciated his collegiality, professionalism, and dedication throughout this project.
Special thanks to Tom Woodward, director of learning spaces and technologies at Middlebury College. As our technology lead, Tom gave us cheerful and expert help in working through various technical issues. Matt Roberts, web developer/designer at VCU Online and Continuing and Professional Education, also provided key technical assistance with Pressbooks and the online publishing process.
A huge thanks goes to Matt DeCarlo, who was amazingly generous in his advice and guidance as we began this undertaking. His enthusiasm for OER was infectious, and we benefited greatly from his example and from the openly licensed material in his two excellent research methods textbooks: Scientific Inquiry in Social Work (2018) and Graduate Research Methods in Social Work (2021).
We would also like to thank Maureen O’Driscoll, copy editor, and Suzanne Pfister, project manager, at KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. for their incredible copyediting support. Andrew Park helped locate and organize citations and references and also wrote a sidebar, The Bell Curve and Its Critics. Many thanks to Melanie Barnes, senior finance technician at VCU’s College of Humanities and Sciences, for her administrative assistance in managing our grants. Thanks as well to Kelsey Cheshire and Abbey Childs at VCU Libraries for their support and suggestions.
We are indebted to faculty and students who reviewed and provided constructive feedback on chapters: Katherine K. Chen, Eli Coston, Meredith Katz, Frankie Mastrangelo, and Ian Almond.
We are incredibly grateful to the sociologists who allowed us to interview them for this textbook and whose expertise provides real-life examples of the methodological concepts and approaches explained in many of our chapters: Elyas Bakhtiari, Amy L. Best, Didem Danış, Sarah Dewees, Jennifer Johnson, Leslie Martin, Chinyere Osuji, Allison Pugh, and Joyce Rothschild.
Finally, we would like to express our great appreciation to the authors whose open textbooks served as content sources for many of our chapters: Anol Bhattacherjee, Amy Blackstone, I-Chant A. Chiang, Matthew DeCarlo, and Rajiv Jhangiani.
