Understanding research

Understanding Research is an accessible and visually-appealing introduction to research.  Whether students become producers or consumers of research, this text shows them that the subject is both interesting and highly relevant for their lives and professional work.

• Chapter 1 Why do research?
• On What Basis Do You Make Decisions?
• How Do We Know What We Know?
• Ways of Knowing Without Research Developing Critical Thinking Skills What is Empirical Social Research?
• Research versus Empirical Social Research What do you need for Good Social Research?
• Varieties of Social Research Fit the Question You Want to Answer With a Type of Social Research Exploring
• Describing Explaining Evaluating Steps in the Research Process
• What have you learned?
• Applying what you learned
• Chapter 2 Planning a Study Picking a Study Topic Conducting a Review Past Studies Where do you find the research literature?
• How to conduct a literature review: A six step process Focusing on a Research Question The Research Proposal
• Chapter 3 Becoming an Ethical Researcher
• The Ethical Imperative Scientific Misconduct Unethical but Legal Ethical Issues Involving Research
• Participants Protect Research
• Participants from Harm Strict Limits to Using Deception in Research
• Participation Should be Voluntary and Informed Protecting the Privacy of Research
• Participant Information Extra Protections for Special Populations Formal Protections for Research
• Participants Ethics and the Sponsors of Research Politics of Research
• Value-Free and Objective Research
• Chapter 4 Sampling, How to select a few to represent the many How and Why do Samples Work?
• Focusing on at a specific group: four types of non-random samples
• Convenience Quota Purposive Snowball Coming to Conclusions about Large Populations
• Why Use a Random Sample Types of Random Samples Three Specialized
• Sampling Techniques Random Digit Dialing Within Household Samples
• Sampling Hidden Populations Inferences from a Sample to a Population
• How to Reduce Sampling Errors How Large Should My Sample Be?
• How to Create a Zone of Confidence What Have You Learned?
• Chapter 5 Measuring Social Life, How Many?
• How Much?
• What Type?
• Why Measure?
• Making Aspects of the Social World Visible Measuring with Numbers or Words
• How to Create Good Measures: Reliability and Validity A Guide to Quantitative Measures
• How to create an Index How to create a Scale
• What have you Learned?
• Chapter 6 The Survey: Asking People Questions What is a Social Survey?
• How to Conduct a Survey Writing Good Survey Questions Effective Questionnaire
• Design Tips Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Survey Formats Survey Interviewing
• Chapter 7 The Experiment Doing Experiments in Everyday Life
• What Questions Can You Answer with the Experimental Method?
• Why Assign People Randomly?
• Do You Speak the Language of Experimental Design?
• Experimental Validity Inside and Out
• What You Can See In Experimental Results with Comparison
• How to be Ethical in Experiments
• What did you Learn?
• Chapter 8 Research With Non-Reactive
• Measures Analyzing Physical Evidence for Clues About Social Life
• Revealing the Content Buried Within Communication Messages
• Mining Existing Statistical Sources to Answer
• New Questions Answering
• New Questions Using Survey Data Collected by Others
• Conducting Ethical Non-Reactive Research Chap