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SAGE 800.818.7243 OR 805.499.9774 6 A.M. TO 5 P.M. PT FAX: 805.375.5291 62 INNOVATIVE RESEARCH Have a topic for a Little Green Book? Share your ideas with QASS Series Editor Barbara Entwisle at entwisle@unc.edu or learn more at sagepub.com/qass. They're perfect for what they do. They're highly focused. Whatever the topic is, you're going to get a really great introduction to it. Four Decades In, Little Green Books Keep Growing Series Editor Barbara Entwisle explains how the Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences (QASS) series is evolving with social science data while keeping its identity. Are the methods used in social and behavioral research essentially ageless? Or do changes in data size, shape and collection require new techniques and rethinking? That's the circle that Barbara Entwisle, the latest editor of the renowned series of Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences books, is tasked with squaring. Entwisle, who is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught research methods most of her career, sees a social science data infrastructure that is evolving, and fast. "I think we need to include new topics and new techniques into the series," she says. "But a lot of the questions about measurement and analysis, conceptualization, those kinds of things, are not necessarily changing." So while i t c a n i n c o r p o r a t e a g r e a t e r d i v e r s i t y o f t h e kind of data and tools people work with—think gathering social network data or propensity score analysis—the series can retain its identity. Affectionately known since its 1976 debut as "the little green books," the series combines innovative approaches, scholarly attention, discipline-defining pedagogy, quality presentation, and affordable price into a monograph-sized package with almost 180 titles in print, and two dozen more in the works. Each volume is the equivalent of a short course on a single topic. "We published one recently by a very well-known econometrician, Damodar Gujarati, called Linear Regression: A Mathematical Introduction," Entwisle says. "Reading it felt like the author was standing right in front of me, talking me through it. They're perfect for what they do. They're highly focused. Whatever the topic is, you're going to get a really great introduction to it." They also serve as part of the "socialization" of junior people—getting your first little green book is a milestone. Entwisle remembers her own first little green book: Confirmatory Factor Analysis by Scott Long. "I read that and studied it from cover to cover. It's a wonderful book. I learned from it, and it helped me in an immediate application, and it introduced me and hooked me into the technical literature. Even though I had no money as a grad student, I went and invested in several more." Now, as editor, she invests in them in a different way. Take that Scott Long book, which used a statistical software package no longer in vogue. She's commissioned a new volume on the topic, by Micah Roos and Shawn Bauldry. Long was happy to see a new team take the helm—he quoted one of his colleagues as saying "Well, what took you so long?" when Long announced that a new volume on the topic had been commissioned.

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