Handbook of Applied Social Research Methods

Social scientists are frequently asked to tackle real-world social problems ranging from topics as diverse as estimating the impact of an environmental disaster to evaluating the effectiveness of a program to reduce teenage pregnancy. The applied research environment, however, is often complex, chaotic, and highly political, with pressures for quick conclusive answers for situations in which the researcher has little or no experimental control. How can a researcher develop accurate information about complex real world issues when operating within budgetary, timing and staffing constraints?

The Handbook of Applied Research Methods provides a practical guide to selecting the appropriate questions and procedures from among the diverse perspectives and methodologies available. Through the use of examples and illustrations, often based on the contributors' own experience and work, the book shows readers how to plan social research, collect both quantitative and qualitative data, and manage and present these data to a range of audiences. Well-known and highly regarded contributors from academic to private sector settings address such pertinent issues as:

- Ways to determine if the resources necessary for implementing the research design are in place.

- The trade-offs that need to be considered in the design phase when balancing the needs for the research to be timely, credible and high quality.

- Sound research practices that can increase the effect size and the statistical power of a study.

- How to make sampling decisions in the context of how those decisions affect total error.

- The importance of having an underlying conceptual scheme to guide the design of a quantitative study.

- Strategies for obtaining informed consent and techniques for ensuring privacy and confidentiality, particularly among vulnerable populations, such as individuals with AIDS or with children

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- Best ways to implement a randomized design in a field setting.

- Methods for avoiding some of the difficulties in planning and interpreting results from quasi-experiments.

- Techniques for designing, conducting, and analyzing case studies to examine how and why an intervention was successful.

- How to identify and assess needs and allocate scarce resources.

- How to identify factors that may moderate the effectiveness of an intervention's outcome or cost-effectiveness.

- Strategies for combining studies, determining what statistics to use, and decision rules about including poor quality or controversial studies.

- Aids for reducing recall problems and ways to obtain valid answers to sensitive survey questions.

- Techniques for collecting, checking, and managing personal interview data, including computerized tracking systems.

- How to improve the response rate in mail surveys, including the type of letter to send and some surprising conclusions about how survey length affects the return rate.

- Steps to doing an ethnographic study from equipment to ethics to writing up the results.

- Ways to form a focus group, select a moderator, and analyze the results using qualitative and quantitative approaches.

- How to graphically display data so as to clarify the presentation of the data and avoid ambiguity.

The Handbook of Applied Social Research Methods provides readers with an intelligent guide to selecting the approach, specific designs, and data collection procedures to use in their applied social research.