One issue I had with the order of the chapters in the text was including Ethics at the end in the Epilogue as if it was an after thought. This format also enables instructors to easily supplement with other materials. I think this book is very well-suited for intro graduate level courses in research methods, as long as instructors are comfortable with this as an overview supplement rather than a detailed stand alone resource for students. But for the broad mainstream of the social sciences, there will be little in this book that stands out as unusual, controversial, or one-sided. Some of the most sophisticated software programs available today, like Linux and Apache, are also free, and so is this book.Fourth, I plan to make local-language versions of this book available in due course of time, and those translated versions will also be free. Important terms are also highlighted by bolding, making it easy for the reader to identify the important concepts. The topics generally flow well as presented; the only exception is having the section on research ethics at the end. The text included relevant descriptions of current software commonly used in research. 0000001541 00000 n
I’m comfortable that I could rely on this book in class without worrying over slanted content or editorialization. The writing is very easy to follow with helpful examples. I found no errors in content and no observable bias in any of the chapters. Thefirst and broadest objective is to protect human participants. This text introduces social science doctoral students to the research process. For a textbook intended to keep costs at zero, these are glaring omissions. The individual chapters stand on their own and do not require contextualization. There are not many examples, which means there is little opportunity to offend. For instance, what type of problem is unresearchable? For example, Survey Monkey and social media can be included in Chapter 9 (Survey Research) and structure equation modeling can be introduced in Chapter 15. The second and third chapters are excellent for the researcher who is just starting out to formulate a research question. Most doctoral seminars include a fair complement of readings drawn from the respective discipline. While images were viewable, many appeared 'pixelated'/'grainy' (low resolution). A glossary would be helpful as students often need to reference basic definitions as they learn these new concepts. -developing a research question Some chapters seem to end abruptly while other chapters have excellent summaries or conclusions. They succinctly cover a lot of information is a way that is very consumable. 458 0 obj<>stream
I do supplement the text with additional readings on: It's a great starting point for teaching my students to think about the basics of social science research and provides a nice skeleton on which I can layer more in-depth material for my course. The chapters are excellent stand alone essays that could be used interchangeably. The portions of the text that are less relevant to the course I teach (i.e. It's a trade-off, I think, that is worth making. Graphics and charts are clear and easy to see in the online pdf version. (Note: The scale is confusing. This makes the book quite comprehensive in that the book could... Dr. Bhattacherjee’s book, Social Science Research, is a good introductory textbook for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students to learn about the research process. While the statement is still relevant, the numbers the author cited appear to be old and Excel has since been updated to handle larger datasets (1,000,000 observations and 16,000 items) than what the author had listed. The contents of the text are not dated and the author does a fantastic job of offering a variety of relevant examples so that readers of all backgrounds can relate to the content. I did notice a discrepancy in Figure 5.1, where “single case study” is plotted on the graph as high in external validity, but the rest of the text frequently brought up case studies (especially single case studies) having the difficulty with generalizability which should have low external validity.