This unique reader introduces the social research process by pairing sixteen published research articles with candid interviews with the lead researcher on each study. The interviews bring the research process to life, showing it as a human activity involving choices and constraints, challenges and surprises, frustrations and satisfactions, and collaboration among colleagues. The selections represent a wide range of methodological approaches, and many different subfields of sociology and related disciplines, such as criminology, family studies, gender, disaster research, mass media, health care, religion, rural sociology, race and ethnicity, social movements, comparative studies, evaluation research, historical analysis, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.