Designing Social Research
A Guide for the Bewildered
- Ian Greener - Durham University, UK
Using everyday jargon-free language, Designing Social Research guides you through the jungle of setting up a research study. Ian Greener provides guidance on how to practically plan your research and helps you to understand the underpinning methodological principles that should inform your decisions about the methods you plan to use.
This is the perfect book for beginner students and new researchers looking to design a research project and make sense of and justify the many decisions that go into the research design process. It will help you to assess the appropriateness of a range of methods and to understand the strengths and limitations of different approaches to research.
Greener highlights key debates in the field, both philosophical and practical, and presents them in such a way that they remain constantly relevant to research practice of his readers. Coverage includes:
- Framing an effective research question/problem;
- Examining the jargon of social research;
- The links between theory, methodology and method;
- The role of literature reviewing in research design;
- Managing and planning the research process;
- Sampling;
- Qualitative designs;
- Quantitative designs;
- Mixed methods designs;
- Data analysis.
Designing Social Research will be ideal first reading for undergraduates planning significant research projects for their dissertations. It will also be invaluable to first year PhD students considering how they will go about their research projects.
This is a detailed text which approaches many important areas of social research. The writing is informal and accessible with many practical pieces of advice for the novice researcher. The five things to remember at the end of each chapter pull the chapter's content together and more easily enables students to dip into the text.
This is a detailed text which approaches many important areas of social research. The writing is informal and accessible with many practical pieces of advice for the novice researcher. The five things to remember at the end of each chapter pull the chapter's content together and more easily enables students to dip into the text.
The book can be better in terms of defining (explaining) main concepts and giving more examples. These are essential for teaching Research Methods at undergraduate level.
However, the book can be used as a supplementary book.
This is a good book which I would have liked to have at the beginning of my academic career. It is easy to understand and provides a good idea of what social research may look like and how this 'business' works. However, if one has been around in academia and the world of journal publications for a while, this book will be too superficial.
I really appreciated the concise nature of the this book's chapters and the helpful 'Things to Remember' at the end of each chapter. However, I found the philosophical schools used by the author as a framing device (e.g. in discussing what 'realists' versus 'idealists' look for in a review of the literature) to be unhelpful and potentially confusing for students in my field.
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I also must note that this text is rife with typos - I counted 4 or 5 just in the first chapter. It is almost as though the text was not copy edited.
An ideal text for undergraduate student dissertation preparation. The key points at the end of each chapter appearing as 'Five things to remember about this chapter' will definitely prove to be a good source of a recap task to use by asking students to elaborate in-depth using any of the five points what they understood about the topic after reading the chapter.
the text book is consider for a new Masters programme planned to start in 2015
This book is a most welcomed addition to the wide array of books on research methods. It is very user friendly and should be an encouraging read for 'bewildered' students on undergraduate and post graduate courses who are learning about research for the first time. Students should fine the book particularly easy to read because it manages to provide complex information in accessible and easy to understand language which is concise, yet precise. I have therefore included this book on the reading list for students embarking on their social research course in the autumn. for
Greener deals with some of the concepts that students struggle with in Research Methods in a clear and comprehensible manner. This is a useful book as a general introduction to Research Methods.
The lay out of this book is different as it uses a more discursive approach. This makes reading the book quite tiring as there is no pictures or many breaks in the text . However the content is excellent and if the reader can overcome to need to read in bit sized chunks then this is a book that teaches as well as making you think. A rare feat in a research methods text book!
