Research Methods in Social Relations E-Book

Geoffrey Maruyama

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1279

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Research Methods in Social Relations, 8th Edition, features a series of updates and revisions in its comprehensive introduction to current research methods in the social and behavioural sciences.

• Offers comprehensive coverage of a wide variety of traditional and topical research methods
• Addresses many newer research approaches such as propensity score matching, mixed methods designs, and confirmatory factor analysis
• Written to be accessible to a range of social and behavioural science disciplines, including public health, political science, sociology, and psychology
• Includes new chapters that engage readers in critical thinking about the processes involved in building sustainable partnerships in field and community settings
• The Companion website includes an array of resources for Instructors, including Test Banks, Power Point lecture slides, discussion questions and exercises
• This new edition is the much-anticipated follow-up to 2001’s seventh edition by Hoyle, Harris and Judd

Leseprobe

This edition first published 2014

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Edition history: Thomson Learning, Inc. (7e, 2002)

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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-118-76497-8

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Cover image: © Kevin Lau Photography / Getty Images.

Preface to the Eighth Edition

What's on your mind? Sorting out a relationship, thinking about what your partner really meant by their last sentence to you, determining which way to drive home today, thinking about when you will be hungry and what you might eat – the possibilities are endless. Of importance for this book, things that you are thinking about and the ways you think about them involve use of a “research” process. So, even if you have never had a research methods course, you have experience with research methods – not necessarily well-designed methods, but methods nonetheless. This happens as we translate our thoughts into questions. In our day-to-day lives, we formulate all kinds of questions, some widely shared, others totally idiosyncratic to us individually: Why do some people speak with accents? Why doesn't everyone use a seat belt when they drive a car or a helmet when they ride a bike? Why do junior high students behave so strangely? Why would anyone dress like that? What kinds of people write research methods books? Although some questions are simply idle musings, most frame our thinking about some issue, and get us thinking about how we might answer them. In effect, they define our individual “research” processes. An exciting aspect of the focus of this methods book on social relations is that through that focus readers should be reflecting explicitly on how they study themselves and others, and what they think and do in their everyday lives. Hopefully, readers will realize that social and behavioral sciences have a lot to say about human behavior as well as good tools to continue to add to that knowledge. Importantly, if the things that social scientists studied were not related to everyday life, what good would our science be? In the language of research methods, we would be engaging in research that has no external validity.

In going about answering questions, we all are scientists – not in a career or disciplinary sense, but by engaging in ongoing everyday human processes of observation, action, and inference to make sense of our world and develop expectations for future interactions. Heider (1958) called this process naïve psychology, describing ways in which humans engage in processes like those of scientists, but without using scientists' formal methods, rigor, or tools – such as setting up experimental designs, including control groups, generating alternative hypotheses, separating causation from covariation, or engaging in systematic observation using a specific protocol. Thus, this “science” is naïve, for it is imprecise and often inaccurate. (We will discuss issues of naïve psychology in greater detail in Chapter 1.) Most importantly for this book, however, even readers most naïve about social science methods come to the book with beliefs about causality based on their own personal processes of observation and inference, in effect already familiar with some building blocks of science.

Our goal is to translate readers' “naïve” or partly formed ideas about scientific meth­ods into more rigorous and complete ones tied to valid and reliable approaches/methods. We are humbled by the privilege we have been given by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) to create the eighth edition of Research Methods in Social Relations (RMSR), and hope that our work continues the successes of prior editions. We have great respect for the strong core and tradition in the approaches of the previous seven editions of RMSR, and are grateful to those colleagues who authored them for giving us a great framework and content on which to build. In many instances, we needed to add little to what has previously been said. In other instances, however, because methods and even orientations to research are continually changing, we added new material to address the range of complementary approaches that are prevalent today. But we also are committed to sustaining the historical focus on quantitative and experimental methods, for those remain as important today as ever. If you are not so sure, think as examples about widespread use of clinical trials in biomedical research, of product testing in marketing and other consumer psychology areas, and of use of “effective practices” in education. We have a strong interest in keeping the book aligned with its roots in social relations as we discuss different methods, for such issues are not only central to SPSSI, they still sit front and center in the conflicts that threaten today's world. They are prominent within as well as across countries. Social relations also historically have considered and addressed issues of disparity, disadvantage, discrimination, and privilege, themes that are particularly relevant in our diverse and often stratified world.

Since the seventh edition was written, universities increasingly have been rediscovering their roles and responsibilities in addressing key issues and challenges of today's world. So to us it is important to illustrate the ways that researchers have used various methods to answer questions about social policy and practices, and how methods can engage communities and community partners as co-investigators in the research process. We have added a chapter on working with policy makers and practitioners, included more information about cultural issues, and expanded coverage of methods used for engaged research. Engaged research traditions, often using action research approaches, have long been part of what SPSSI has done and studied, so we are thrilled to see universities move toward what SPSSI has long championed.

We believe that this book is relevant for audiences from an array of fields. Certainly, it is targeted toward the social and behavioral sciences, fields including psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. But it also targets researchers in professional schools and other translational programs that draw methods and approaches from basic disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Those include business, education, public affairs, law, agriculture and natural resources, and public health and other academic health center units, including medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and veterinary medicine. Simply, in today's very interdisciplinary academic world, research methods transcend disciplines, and researchers from a full array of disciplines search for the methods that most effectively help them to address the problems and issues that they study.

Structure of Eighth Edition

The approaches of the previous seven editions of RMSR provide us with a great core and tradition. We have attempted to sustain the strong focus on quantitative and experimental methods, but also to address the range of complementary approaches that are prevalent today. We have kept the book aligned with its roots in social relations as we discuss different methods, for example, illustrating the ways that researchers have used various methods to answer questions about social policy and practices. We have tried to illustrate the role of multiple methods and research programs in providing information that helps researchers and policy makers to arrive at general conclusions.

This edition represents a major restructuring and rewriting of the book, with several new and expanded chapters and consolidation of existing chapters. No major methodological content area has been dropped, although the focus shifts some to reflect newer approaches. We have reordered the chapters, for the most part, to reflect the sequence in which the researcher needs to think about the research process as it unfolds. The first section tries to get readers to think about the research process, how it differs from their everyday lives, the importance of ethics, and the different types of settings in which they might work. The book begins by discussing how theories, ways of thinking, and settings provide the underpinnings of research in the social sciences. It covers in more detail how researchers improve on the processes we all use in our everyday lives to make sense of our world and how it operates, then discusses the nature of theories and how they are evaluated. Then Chapter 3 covers ethics of research, and Chapter 4 discusses relationships of researchers with practitioners, policy makers, and participants in the research process. The first section concludes with chapters on laboratory research and on research in field and community settings.

The second section covers issues of measurement and sampling, and then describes a broad array of approaches to doing research. It begins with three chapters covering issues relevant to all types of research, namely, reliability, validity, and sampling. Then the next seven chapters cover the full range of research types and settings: experi­mental research, quasi-experimental research, non-experimental research, qualitative research, survey research, evaluation research, and mixed methods research.

The third and final section (Analysis and Writing), which could be placed earlier, covers ways to review literatures and write research reports. It has two chapters, one that covers ways of reviewing existing information on the topic of the research, including quantitative as well as qualitative reviews of research, and a second chapter that covers the process of writing the research report. The final two chapters primarily provide context for the methods that we have described, helping readers to consolidate theory with methods in the processes of conducting and describing research. Obviously, critical reviews of the literature need to be done early in the research process, but at the same time they require background in methods. They were left until the end in part because most researchers come to the task of learning methods already possessing knowledge about substantive literature, namely, theory and empirical research, and the areas in which they will be doing research.

We have omitted chapters that cover basic statistical methods and data coding, for there is much to cover within research methods domains. We believe that statistical issues are better covered in statistics books, that many students have taken statistics coursework prior to or concurrent with their methods course, and that details concerning statistical analyses are readily available on the web. However, we introduce some concepts (e.g., effect sizes and statistical power, confirmatory factor analysis) when they are directly relevant to methodological considerations. And we describe the kinds of descriptive and inferential statistical methods that typically are used along with different methods, so readers can think about the statistical techniques that they will need to use if they choose particular methods. We have expanded coverage of quantitative non-experimental research methods, of doing research in community-based settings, of qualitative methods, and of mixed methods approaches.

We hope readers find the eighth edition useful, and welcome comments about the book.

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, we acknowledge our indebtedness to the many SPSSI members who contributed to the previous seven editions of Research Methods in Social Relations. They provided us with a framework that has been highly successful and that has shaped careers of generations of researchers, including the two of us. We own editions 3 through 7 of the book, which should tell readers how influential it has been in our careers. We hope that our efforts will continue that tradition.

In particular, we are grateful to Rick Hoyle, lead author of the seventh edition, for sharing manuscript copies of the seventh edition, providing us with a starting point for our work. We are grateful for the support and suggestions of the SPSSI publications committee and particularly its co-chairs, Chris Crandall and Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta; SPSSI, which arranged the move of RMSR from its prior publisher Cengage to Wiley Blackwell; and to our partners at Wiley Blackwell, Olivia Evans, Karen Shield, and particularly Jennifer Bray, our development editor. We have received valuable feedback from two anonymous reviewers as well as many colleagues, in particular Drs. Suzanne Russ (Dickinson State University), Panayiota Kendeau (University of Minnesota), and Norman Miller (University of Southern California). Dr. Kendeau was kind enough to use a manuscript version of the text in a graduate methods course at Minnesota to gather feedback from the students taking the course; to them we also are grateful. Ryan also used the manuscript in her graduate methods course at UNO; we are grateful to those students for their feedback as well. One of Maruyama's graduate students, Martin Van Boekel, both read the book and provided new references and web links for the eighth edition. Finally, Ryan's son, Tim Ryan, created several of the figures for this edition.

We also need to acknowledge the contributions of those who trained us in research methods, our advisors, Dr. Norman Miller and Drs. Charles Judd, Bernadette Park, and Gary McClelland. Finally, we appreciate the support and encouragement of our families, who tolerated us working on the book at strange times and places – like when we were on family vacations.

About the Companion Website

This book is accompanied by a companion website:

www.wiley.com/go/maruyama

The website includes these materials for instructors:

Sample syllabi

Suggestions for using discussion questions and exercises

Test Banks for every chapter

Power Point lecture slides for every chapter

Part IUnderpinnings of Social Relations Research

Chapter 1Ways of Thinking and Knowing

Recognizing Importance of Research Methods and Relevance of Research

Perspective

The Place of Values in Social Science Research

Contestability in Social and Physical Sciences

Casual Observation

Naïve Hypotheses and Theories of Social Behavior