Summary
Contents
Subject index
“There is no doubt that this book will be well received by those who are fortunate enough to come across it. This book will be of use to the growing number of people involved either as purchasers or providers of research. Don't go to work without it!” – Health Services Management Research Journal “I would recommend [this book] to a colleague as a useful companion text for students. I would say that this is an engaging discussion of experimental research for social, behavioral, and health science students. The writing style is fresh and entertaining, and draws the willing reader into thinking through the process of designing and conducting experimental research. It is not a ‘cookbook’ or a compendium of facts. Rather, it is a pragmatic and thoughtful description intended to help students understand how to design meaningful experiments, and by understanding that, they will also understand how to interpret research they do not conduct themselves.” – Katharyn A. May, School of Nursing, Vanderbilt University “This slim but packed volume is written for prospective researchers in the social and health sciences. The writing style is lively, encouraging, upbeat. R. Barker Bausell brings science down to earth without sacrificing respect for rigor and complexity…. Recommended for all institutions with undergraduate or graduate research requirements in the social and health sciences.” – Choice Tired of research methods books that tell how to perform a research study without any mention of the why behind doing research? Aimed at communicating the excitement and responsibility of the research process, this remarkable volume enables you to evaluate beforehand whether a prospective research study has the potential to either improve the human condition, contribute to theory formation, or explain the etiology of a significant phenomenon rather than to produce just another “publishable” study. By emphasizing how to think about and strategize a research study, R. Barker Bausell shows you the important steps of a scientific study–from the formulation of the problem to the write-up of the results. Replete with illustrative examples drawn from the social, health, and behavioral sciences, this volume is a must for all serious researchers.
Evaluating the Meaningfulness of the Research Hypothesis
Evaluating the Meaningfulness of the Research Hypothesis
It is now time to attempt one of the most important, difficult, and often neglected steps in the research process: evaluating the meaningfulness of one's hypothesis(es) for the express purpose of deciding whether the parent study is worth conducting. Formulating a testable hypothesis comprised of an important outcome variable and an intervention that is theoretically capable of manipulating this outcome is a very important step. There is no guarantee, however, that the actual testing of such a hypothesis will produce results capable of:
- generating a high quality causal inference,
- providing a mechanism for improving the quality of someone's life, and/or
- satisfying the researcher's personal objectives for conducting the study in the first ...
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