Structured around one of the concepts students struggle with the most-the research question-this book begins with how to understand the role of good questions before demonstrating how questions underpin good research designs and how social research can be framed as asking and answering questions. Perfect for undergraduate students new to methods, it teaches students how qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research can be used to answer these questions. "An incredibly resourceful book that contains a forensic insight into social research methods, offering the full range of contemporary approaches. Students will find particular value in the accessibility and detail of the text. Each chapter provides a set of learning outcomes, study questions and further reading." - Dr Ruth McAreavey, Newcastle University Supported by a website that maps online resources to key stages of the learning process, it helps students: - Understand the scientific method - Learn the vocabulary of social science research - Plan and design research - Practice with and interpret data - Explore social science literature and improve assignments with good citations - Improve critical thinking. Extensive visualizations, overviews, examples, exercises, and other learning features, make this the perfect introductory text to build confidence and best practice around research methods.
Part I: Researching Society Chapter 1: How and why we study society Chapter 2: Methods and methodologies in social science Chapter 3: The ethics and politics of research Part II: Designing Social Research Chapter 4: Creating research questions Chapter 5: Doing a literature review Chapter 6: Choosing a research design Chapter 7: Finding sources and data Chapter 8: Sampling Part III: Data Collection and Data Quality Chapter 9: Ethnography and participant observation Chapter 10: Unstructured interviews and focus groups Chapter 11: Documentary sources and qualitative content analysis Chapter 12: Structured observation Chapter 13: Questionnaires and surveys Chapter 14: Quantitative content analysis Chapter 15: Data quality, reliability and validity Part IV: Data Analysis Chapter 16: Analysis of qualitative data Chapter 17: Indexes and distributions Chapter 18: Relationships between variables Chapter 19: Statistical generalization Chapter 20: Mixed methods and combining data Part V: Asking and Answering Questions in Social Science Chapter 21: Description, explanation and understanding Chapter 22: Time, space and level Chapter 23: Relations, networks and structures Chapter 24: Big data and computational social science Part VI: Writing and Presenting Research Chapter 25: Working with data visualization Chapter 26: Writing about research
