This accessible and engaging textbook helps students to get to grips with key concepts, issues, and practices in social science research through the use of fun and informative illustrations and examples.
Written and illustrated by an experienced teacher of research methods in the social sciences, each chapter explains research concepts while using everyday examples and illustrations to make applied research comprehensive to students. It explains the step-by-step process for carrying out research through a range of topics and approaches, including survey research, research ethics, sampling, and experimental research. Chapters also include learning objectives, class activities, key terms, helpful hints, and suggestions for further reading.
This book will be essential reading for any undergraduate research methodology class in the social sciences.
Introduction
1. Research methods: An overview
2. The research steps
3. Research ethics
4. Defining and measuring concepts
5. Sampling
6. Collecting primary data: Survey research methods
7. Collecting primary data: Experiment research methods
8. Collecting primary data – Qualitative methods: Focus groups, observation, intensive interviews
Biography
Divya Sharma is Professor of Justice and Law Administration at Western Connecticut State University, CT, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Master’s degrees in Sociology and Criminal Justice. Her research interests include informal banking systems, visual criminology, cultural communication, and white-collar crimes. She has collected data in India, Kenya, and the United States. She specializes in program and policy evaluation, survey and field research, and research ethics concerning nonwestern and cross-cultural settings and digital data. She has developed and taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in criminal justice, homeland security, and sociology, and has extensive experience in supervising student research projects involving primary and secondary data. She is the author of the textbook Fundamentals of Criminology (2019), and editor of Ethics, Ethnocentrism and Social Science Research (2021).
