Overview

This section provides an outline of the contents of the site.

The site has five main parts. Part 1, "Thinking Like a Researcher," introduces you to social research and the way researchers look at the world around them. Part 2 describes what you need to know to plan a research project. In Part 3 you will learn about ways of collecting data. Ways of analyzing data are described in Part 4. The last step in a research project — presenting your results — is covered in Part 5.

Part 1 introduces you to scientific inquiry and the research process. Scientific inquiry is the focus of Chapter 1. Chapter 1 also describes the steps in the research process. Chapter 2 describes social research as it was carried out in the form of the Sudan Fertility Survey and presents some of the important findings from this study. Becoming a social researcher also requires learning the language of social research. Chapter 3 will give you a basic research vocabulary. Together, the three chapters of Part 1 will give you a foundation for planning and conducting your own research.

Part 2, "Planning Research," describes how to plan a research project, beginning with the selection of a problem to investigate. Chapter 4 discusses this important step. Also included in Chapter 4 is a closely related step in the research process — that of reviewing the research literature on the topic you choose to investigate. The other four chapters of Part 2 describe how to design a research project. These include decisions you need to make in preparing an overall design for your project (Chapter 5), developing measures for the data you will collect (Chapter 6 and Chapter 7), and preparing a plan for selecting the persons from whom you will collect data (Chapter 8).

Alternative ways of collecting data are described in Part 3, "Creating Data." These are: conducting experiments (Chapter 9); constructing questionnaires for use in surveys (Chapter 10); conducting interviews (Chapter 11); analyzing available data (Chapter 12); observing behavior (Chapter 13); and conducting evaluation studies (Chapter 14). Chapter 15 presents the multi-method approach to data collection. One specific multi-method of research, called Rapid Rural Appraisal, is also described in Chapter 15. One or a combination of the methods described in these   chapters should meet your immediate and most future research needs.

Part 4 contains four chapters on how to organize and analyze data. Chapter 16 describes the important step of preparing data for analysis. The next two chapters describe ways of analyzing your data. Chapter 17 covers the analysis of data for each characteristic you want to know about. Researchers refer to the characteristics they study as variables. Ways of analyzing of two or more variables are covered in Chapter 18. Chapter 19 presents the logic and methods for using statistical tests in data analysis.  

Finally, Part 5, with only one chapter, Chapter 20, describes how to prepare for and write a report describing your research project. Part 5 also discusses additional ways you can report your research results — through publication in a professional journal, by giving talks based on your research, by preparing a newspaper or magazine article, or by appearing on a radio or television program.

To help you get an idea of what each chapter contains, we list the main topics covered in the chapter in a column on the left side of each page of each chapter. By clicking on any topic, you can go directly to that topic. Also, figures and diagrams are used to show the sequence of steps in completing a research task. As mentioned earlier, key words used in research are shown in italics when they are first used and are defined in the Glossary. When you discover a term that you are not sure about, you can find its meaning in the Glossary. In addition, a list of "Main points" is included as a summary at the end of each chapter.

Throughout the book, we emphasize the important roles of decision-making and creativity in research.Research does not just happen.The direction and success of any research project depends on the decisions you make at each step in your project. To help you make intelligent decisions, we show the choices that frequently have to be made and give you bases for making them. We also try to show that research is a creative process. By your choices, you create the data you will use to answer your research question. Also, you decide how to analyze, present, and interpret your research results. Each of these steps offers an opportunity to creatively apply what you will have learned.

As you read, we hope you will see that research is a demanding process as well; one that requires knowledge, skill, and careful decision-making. We also hope you will see that research is an exciting, creative, and rewarding activity.

We hope you will find the contents of this site useful. If you do, we would like to hear what you liked or found particularly helpful. If any part is not clear or helpful to you, we want to know about that too. You can send comments, suggestions, and criticisms to us by clicking on Contact Us on any page where it appears. We also welcome your suggestions of links we might add to this site, as a way of further helping other researchers find useful information. Click on Contact Us and send us the address of any Web site you think we should add. We also want to know about any link we provide that that no longer works.   We will use your feedback as we update and revise this site.

Best wishes in any research you undertake.

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