The seventh edition of Exploring Research reflects much of what has taken place in my classrooms over those years.

This book is intended for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in their first research methods course in the social, behavioral, and health sciences fields. These students are the primary audience. But, lately, other disciplines have been introducing research methods courses to their curriculum, such as public policy, government, journalism, and related fields, and stduents there have using Exploring Research as well.

Exploring Research is intended to provide an introduction to the important topics in the general area of research methods and to do so in a nonintimidating and informative way.



Table of Contents:



Preface

Chapter 1. The Role and impronatnce of research

Chapter 2. The Research Process : Coming to terms

Chapter 3A. Selecting a problem and reviewing the research

Chapter 3B. The importance of practicing ethics in research

Chapter 4. Sampling and generalizability

Chapter 5. Measurement, reliability, and validity

Chapter 6. Methods of measuring behavior

Chapter 7. Data collection and descriptive statistics

Chapter 8. Introducing inferential statistics

Chapter 9. Nonexperimental research : descriptive and correlational methods

Chapter 10. Nonexperimental research : Qualitative methods

Chapter 11. Pre-and True experimental research methods

Chapter 12. Quasi-experimental research : a close cousin to experimental research

Chapter 13. Writing a research proposal

Chapter 14. Writing a research manuscript

Appendix A. An introduction to SPSS 16.x*

Appendix B. Sample Data Set

References 297

Glossary 201

Index