Decisions about methodological approaches are pivotal to empirical political science research. Often, however, discussions of the costs and benefits of a given method take place in only a few paragraphs of a journal article. These paragraphs are often designed to highlight the benefits of and dismiss the common critiques against whichever method the author has used in a particular piece of research. By necessity these discussions are often brief and rarely examine how a methodological approach fits within the broader ideas of scientific research.

The relative brevity of “methods” sections is what makes books like Field Experiments and Their Critics useful. This volume, edited by Dawn Langan Teele, offers an in-depth, multi-perspective examination of a methodological approach. Pivotal to this examination is the second part of the title—And Their Critics. More than a discussion of the tremendous potential that field experiments hold for research, the book navigates through the possible costs and benefits of a method to which Teele refers in the book’s preface as an “experimental ‘juggernaut’” (p. vii).

Beginning with a nuanced chapter by Alan Gerber, Donald Green, and Edward Kaplan, “The Illusion of Learning from Observational Research,” the book raises a number of questions, some of which (methodological implementation, ethics, etc.) will ring familiar to scholars who use and are interested in experimental research. Other questions consider what it means to conduct research and propose theories in political science more broadly. Rather than discussing each chapter in isolation, I want to consider the book as the sum of its parts.

In bringing together a variety of scholarly perspectives, this volume attempts to shift scholars away from what I would call a “heuristic” approach to research. In simplest terms, relying on heuristics means using a limited number of cues to glean broader conclusions. If we use method as a heuristic, it can become a blanket cue about the overall usefulness or quality of a work—regardless of the way the method fits within the broader context of a scholar’s data, theory, and research question. The discourse across the chapters of this volume deliberately adds texture and conditionality to the evaluations of method, challenging the application of method as a heuristic. Taken as a whole, the chapters point to the interpretation of a method within the context of the scholar’s goals. Understanding the role of method within a context, this volume suggests, means not only considering the relationship between method and data or between method and theory, but between method and a scholar’s underlying goal in asking a question.

Also notable is the book’s reframing of a number of debates surrounding field experiments in particular—but most experimental research in general. A novel approach to the debates surrounding field experiments is particularly apparent in the volume’s final chapter, titled “Methods Are Like People: If you Focus Only on What They Can’t do, You Will Always Be Disappointed.” In this chapter, Ian Shapiro takes a broader view of methods, writing about what it means to ask research questions. The points raised in this chapter are the types of considerations that are unlikely to be brought up in the “methods” section of a journal article. Grappling with the issues Shapiro raises (what, for example, makes a scientific result an important contribution?) could be a useful exercise even for those who disagree with Shapiro’s ultimate conclusions.

Although there is a commendable diversity of perspectives in this volume, one can’t help but wonder if the set of perspectives could have been even more diverse. It may have been interesting, for example, to include the voice of a scholar who relies largely on laboratory or survey experiments in the social psychological tradition. This type of method may often receive the sharpest of the critiques levied against experiments in political science and it may have been interesting to hear a scholar from this tradition grapple with the issues raised in this volume.

Overall, however, the usefulness of the volume as a whole is that it asks scholars to consider questions beyond “how can I convince a reviewer that this is a valid method?” It may be tempting for readers to select and cite the individual chapters that are most useful to their overall goal of reviewer persuasion. The benefit of the volume, however, is in the collection of ideas—even if those ideas do little to bolster the validity of one’s own methodological perspective.