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This book presents complex concepts in a way that helps students to understand the logic underlying the creation, use, and evaluation of measurement instruments, and to develop a more intuitive feel for how scales work.

This new, updated edition of the widely cited classic offers a unique blend of theory and practice in a single, easy to read source. The Second Edition of Focus Groups: Theory and Practice provides a systematic treatment of the design, conduct, and interpretation of focus group discussions within the context of social science research and theory.

This useful volume provides communities and researchers with the necessary analytic and practical tools for assessing their programmes.

Provides researchers and students with a step-by-step guide to planning qualitative research. This book presents an approach to the components of design and how they interact with each other. It presents a strategy for creating coherent and workable relationships among these design components and highlights key design issues.

Provides a guide to the concept mapping methodology and strategies behind using it for a range of social scientists - including students, researchers, and practitioners. This work pays attention to the issues facing the facilitator of a concept mapping project; and includes chapters on using concept mapping in planning and evaluation.

How can organizations handle the opportunities and threats posed by rapidly changing markets and external conditions? How can they improve their overall effectiveness? The Third Edition of Diagnosing Organizations contains up-to-date treatments of techniques and models for diagnosing how organizations deal with challenges like these.

Using a new model for the classification of types of readings, this book shows how to read, analyze and interpret life story materials. The authors introduce four models: holistic-content reading; holistic-form reading; categorical-content reading; and categorical-form reading.

This practical guide for doing policy analysis is written for academics who want to get their research to the attention of decision-makers in the public sector, or who want to train their students in the skills necessary to undertake policy-relevant research.

This book explores ways of overcoming the problems researchers may encounter in collecting and interpreting data generated from Hispanic studies.

This popular text has a "how to" and "here's what you need to do" approach to ethnographic research, taking the mystery out of the research process and making ethnography accessible to the reader.

Providing readers with an introduction to how to conduct a research synthesis of literature, this Fifth Edition has new material on the use of the internet and other new developments in technology, including new statistics for describing meta-analytic results

Looking for a practical guide to using mixed methodologies? This book explores the most effective way to combine qualitative and quantitative techniques. It begins with a discussion of the paradigm wars between positivism and constructivism, explains the difference between using mixed methods in just the research methodology portion of a study versus using mixed model studies across all phases of the process, and then presents a typology of mixed methods and mixed model studies.

Author Floyd Fowler provides students and researchers who want to collect, analyze, or read about survey data with a sound basis for evaluating how each aspect of a survey can affect its precision, accuracy, and credibility

This book is an invaluable guide to help researchers and graduate students understand ethical concerns within real-life research situations.

Looking at the analysis of policies with a view to changing them, this book is written by an expert on policy research and shows ways of presenting alternatives to policy-makers

The techniques for performing cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in mental health and other human services are introduced in this volume.After describing a model for assessment and improvement-oriented analysis of human service systems using CEA and CBA methods, the author then shows how to analyze each of the links between the expenditure of resources and the achievement of long-term programme objectives. Examples of each step in understanding and improving relationships between resources used, procedures, processes induced and outcomes generated are drawn from the author''s own long and varied experience. They are designed to encourage readers to conduct their own quantitative and qualitative analyses of cost - procedure - process - outcome paths in human services.

What quality control methods can be used most effectively to structure and monitor interviews and convert refusals? What telephone numbers should be used in random digit dialling? How can eligible respondents be chosen and their cooperation secured? Addressing these and other survey issues, this book offers researchers a guide to thinking about and executing telephone surveys from generating phone numbers to structuring the work of interviewers and supervisors. New to this edition are a focus on the total survey error concept, a comparison of CATI (computer-assisted telephone interviews) with PAPI (paper and pencil inventory) procedures, mixed-mode surveys and new telecommunication technologies. In addition, the book covers such topics as h

This new addition to the Applied Social Research Methods series is unrivalled, it is written by leaders in the growing field of rigorous, comparative techniques.

A guide for researchers dealing with the problems of sampling, this book uses the Practical Design Approach and therefore integrates sampling design into the overall research design and explains the inter-relationships between research design and sampling choices.

Reveals the pitfalls and suggest strategies to overcome problems in the design and planning of applied research. With a focus on how to refine research questions as real world events force deviations from the original research plan, this guide discusses how to study and monitor programme implementation and statistical power analysis.