Methodology Books - Page 3

Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research

Richard A. Krueger, Mary Anne Casey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"We want people to listen to us. . . . Focus group interviewing is about listening. It is about paying attention. . . . being nonjudgmental. . . .When used appropriately, the process improves listening and the results can be used to benefit the people who shared the information. And people go away feeling good about having been heard."

--Richard A. Krueger & Mary Anne Casey, from the Preface

This highly acclaimed book in its third edition includes the following updates and improvements:

- Vignettes drawn from small and large focus groups that illustrate problems that come up and effective ways to resolve the issues.

- Designing questions for asking effective questions to draw out a group and how to refine them based on the group’s responses.

- Collaborative Approach updated to address the latest ways to implement the empowerment and action research.

- Budgeting how to more effectively budget for a focus group

- Coding how to more effectively use existing software packages to code and analyze the results of a focus group.

Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach (Applied Social Research Methods)

Joseph A. Maxwell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Are you thinking about doing a qualitative study, or currently in the middle of one? If so, Joseph A. Maxwell's Qualitative Research Design is the reliable guide for you. Taking a hands-on, innovative approach to qualitative design, it emphasizes the components of a design, how these interact with each other, and the environment in which the study is situated. Maxwell provides a clear strategy for creating coherent and workable relationships among these design components, highlighting the key design issues to deal with and describing the main considerations that inform your decisions about these issues. These design issues include clarifying the purpose of your study; creating a theoretical context for the research; formulating research questions; developing a relationship with the people you are studying; making decisions about sampling, data collection, and analysis; and assessing validity threats and alternative explanations to your study's conclusions. The author also explains how to make the transition from your research design to your research proposal, providing an explicit model for the structure of a qualitative proposal that is based on the design of your study. Taking an exceptional approach to research design, Qualitative Research Design provides detailed exercises for applying its information and guidelines to your study.

Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd Edition)

Jacob Cohen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Definitive Power Analysis Text 5 out of 5 stars.
34 of 34 people found this review helpful.

Cohen does a masterful job of taking the guesswork out of statistical power estimation. This text provides procedural guidelines for determining power for many designs, and can be quite helpful in determining proper sample sizes. Not for the casual reader, but a necessary addition to any serious researchers statistical library.

excellent early book on sample size determination, prepared with researchers from the behavioral sciences in mind 5 out of 5 stars.
24 of 24 people found this review helpful.

In the design of clinical trials particularly in the regulatory environment of the FDA the determination of the appropriate number of subjects to recruit for a well-powered statistical hypothesis test ot tests is extremely important. This topic is often neglected in statistical texts, even the elementary ones. It has also been neglected in many of the statistical software products that are available. Recognizing this need Janet Elashoff and Ralph o'Brien were among the first to construct tools for sample size determination and calculation of statistical power. There are now many software products available including nQuery Advisor (Janet Elashoff's product), Power and Precision, PASS, and StatXact. For group sequential and adaptive design methods thare are products such as East, PEST, SeqTrial+ and ADDPLAN to mention a few. Ralph O'Brien's package has now been modified and implimented in SAS with the procedures PROC Power and PROC Glmpower.

This book by Jacob Cohen preceded these developments and became a classic reference for researchers particularly those in the social sciences including behavioral scientists as mentioned in the title. I know of only one other competing book from that time period that being "How Many Subjects" by Helen Kraemer of Stanford University.

Editorial Review:

Statistical Power Analysis is a nontechnical guide to power analysis in research planning that provides users of applied statistics with the tools they need for more effective analysis. The Second Edition includes:
* a chapter covering power analysis in set correlation and multivariate methods;
* a chapter considering effect size, psychometric reliability, and the efficacy of "qualifying" dependent variables and;
* expanded power and sample size tables for multiple regression/correlation.

Survey Research Methods (Applied Social Research Methods)

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Fourth Edition of the bestselling Survey Research Methods presents the very latest methodological knowledge on surveys. Author Floyd J. Fowler Jr. 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.

The Fourth Edition has been updated in four primary ways: it much more prominently addresses the growth of the Internet for data collection and the subsequent rapid expansion of online survey usage; it addresses the precipitous drop in response rates for telephone surveys, particularly those based on random-digit dialing; it offers new and expanded coverage monitoring the continued improvement in techniques for presurvey evaluation of questions; and it addresses the growing role of individual cell phone in addition - and often instead of - household landlines. Two new chapters, “The Nature of Error in Surveys” and “Issues in Analyzing Survey Data,” further emphasize the importance of minimizing nonsampling errors through superior question design, quality interviewing, and high response rates.

Key Features

• Covers the expansion of cell phone use and legislation regarding them; this offers survey researchers guidance as to policy implications and practical application 
• Expands the coverage of web-based and online surveys as well as the latest resources available to the beginning and expert researcher 
  Offers in-depth discussion of non-response and sample size issues, especially as they relate to power
• Focuses on data analysis, especially with regard to bivariate and multivariate approaches. Fowler walks students and researchers through the various types of analyses one would do once the data are ready to analyze. Provides a list of strengths and weaknesses for each of the different types of survey data collection, including the more recent web-based approaches
• Includes updated references and survey examples that offer various levels of students and researchers other exemplary literature and models
  

Survey Research Methods, Fourth Edition gives compact, yet comprehensive coverage, making it an ideal companion or beginning text.

Praise for Floyd J. Fowler, Jr. and the previous edition:

“Fowler is smart, straightforward, and sensible in writing about research methodology. Students have a lot to gain from his wisdom and experience.”
-Mark Berends, Vanderbilt University

Scale Development: Theory and Applications (Applied Social Research Methods)

Robert F. DeVellis

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A best-seller in its First Edition, Scale Development: Theory and Applications, Second Edition has been extensively updated and revised to address changes in the field and topics that have grown in importance since the First Edition. Widely adopted for graduate courses in departments such as Psychology, Public Health, Marketing, Nursing, and Education, this book will prove beneficial to applied researchers across the social sciences.

New to the Second Edition:

• Figures and practical tips for students
• New section on face validity (Chapter 4)
• Substantially expanded presentation of factor analysis (Chapter 6)
• New chapter (7) on item response theory (IRT)
• Coverage of qualitative procedures and issues related to differential item functioning (Chapter 8)

Praise for the First Edition:

"Very readable, well organized, and straightforward. I would recommend this book for practitioners, graduate students, and faculty members who are seeking a practical, rather than a psychometric, treatment of scale development. This book offers a clear overview for those interested in the development and validation of measurement scales."

--EVALUATION PRACTICE

Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling, Second Edition (Methodology In The Social Sciences)

Rex B. Kline

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

great book. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Great book for those wanting to learn Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). From a beginners point-of-view I've found it helpful in integrating regression with SEM models.

Learning SEM. This is the book that you need. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Well...This book is as understandable as statistics can be. You will learn about the advantages of using mathematical models and how they represent reality way better than doing group comparisons. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

This popular text provides an accessible guide to the application, interpretation, and pitfalls of structural equation modeling (SEM). Reviewed are fundamental statistical concepts--such as correlation, regressions, data preparation and screening, path analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis--as well as more advanced methods, including the evaluation of nonlinear effects, measurement models and structural regression models, latent growth models, and multilevel SEM. The companion Web page offers data and program syntax files for many of the research examples, electronic overheads that can be downloaded and printed by instructors or students, and links to SEM-related resources.

Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (2 volume set)

Max Weber

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Editorial Review:

Max Weber's Economy and Society is the greatest sociological treatise written in this century. Published posthumously in Germany in the early 1920's, it has become a constitutive part of the modern sociological imagination. Economy and Society was the first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders in world-historical depth, containing the famous chapters on social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the city, and the political community with its dimensions of class, status and power.
Economy and Status is Weber's only major treatise for an educated general public. It was meant to be a broad introduction, but in its own way it is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies and the wealth of its historical content make the work a continuos challenge at several levels of comprehension: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for his sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber.
When the long-awaited first complete English edition of Economy and Society was published in 1968, Arthur Stinchcombe wrote in the American Journal of Sociology: "My answer to the question of whether people should still start their sociological intellectual biographies with Economy and Society is yes." Reinhard Bendix noted in the American Sociological Review that the "publication of a compete English edition of Weber's most systematic work [represents] the culmination of a cultural transmission to the American setting...It will be a study-guide and compendium for years to come for all those interested in historical sociology and comparative study."
In a lengthy introduction, Guenther Roth traces the intellectual prehistory of Economy and Society, the gradual emergence of its dominant themes and the nature of its internal logic.
Mr. Roth is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Mr. Wittich heads an economic research group at the United Nations.

Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference

Judea Pearl

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Written by one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, this book provides a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of causation. It shows how causality has grown from a nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, cognitive science, and the health and social sciences. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artifical intelligence, business, epidemiology, social science and economics. Students in these areas will find natural models, simple identification procedures, and precise mathematical definitions of causal concepts that traditional texts have tended to evade or make unduly complicated. This book will be of interest to professionals and students in a wide variety of fields. Anyone who wishes to elucidate meaningful relationships from data, predict effects of actions and policies, assess explanations of reported events, or form theories of causal understanding and causal speech will find this book stimulating and invaluable. Professor of Computer Science at the UCLA, Judea Pearl is the winner of the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award in Computers and Cognitive Science.

Designing Social Inquiry

Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, Sidney Verba

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

While heated arguments between practitioners of qualitative and quantitative research have begun to test the very integrity of the social sciences, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba have produced a farsighted and timely book that promises to sharpen and strengthen a wide range of research performed in this field. These leading scholars, each representing diverse academic traditions, have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. Their book demonstrates that the same logic of inference underlies both good quantitative and good qualitative research designs, and their approach applies equally to each.

Providing precepts intended to stimulate and discipline thought, the authors explore issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and generally improving qualitative research. Among the specific topics they address are interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. Mathematical notation is occasionally used to clarify concepts, but no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics is assumed. The unified logic of inference that this book explicates will be enormously useful to qualitative researchers of all traditions and substantive fields.

Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studuies

Robert S. Weiss

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Best introduction to qualitative interviewing 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Learning From Strangers is the best introduction to how to do qualitative interviewing that I know of, and it's one of two books that I assign in my course on qualitative research methods (the other is Corrine Glesne's Becoming Qualitative Researchers). It is very readable, but also deeply insightful and informed by Weiss's many years of interviewing. The most valuable part of the book, and one thing that sets it apart from most other books on qualitative interviewing, is that it includes lengthy excerpts from actual interview transcripts, with Weiss's detailed commentary on what worked well and what didn't. The book also has excellent advice on developing interview questions, selecting interviewees, analyzing interview data, and writing the final report.

Editorial Review:

Drawing on Weiss's thirty years' experience interviewing and teaching others, Learning from Strangers is the definitive work on qualitative research interviewing. The author of many successful books, Dr. Weiss provides examples and running commentary on how each interaction either inhibits or promotes trust and alliance. Used as a reference, handbook, or text, this book is appropriate for novices and professionals.