This useful volume will help researchers and practitioners ensure the legal relevance of their initial research question as well as conduct their own evaluation of the primary legal materials. The book describes how to use a law library to: find, cite and track cases; uncover statutes passed by the state legislatures; examine the legislative history of these statutes and administrative rules and regulations; and discover decisions promulgated by state agencies. In addition it includes exercises that give readers an opportunity to go into the law library and test their developing skills on...

How can one tell if a new programme has been effective or not? Is there any way to predict how a group of individuals would have fared without the new programme or service? Packed with rich and varied examples, Robert F Boruch's book untangles the complexities of randomized field experiments to enable researchers to evaluate better the impact of new programmes. After an exploration of how to judge whether or not a programme worked, the author discusses: the context of experiments; the standards used to judge the ethical propriety of randomized experiments; methods for studying populations;...

This book explores ways of overcoming the problems researchers may encounter in collecting and interpreting data generated from Hispanic studies.

This volume aims to help prospective educational researchers plan their research in schools more carefully. It focuses on such issues as: access and credibility in the school; traditional issues of designing research; questions that emerge as the design is imposed on the school culture and setting particularly with regard to school staff and student assessment; the length of interventions and whether or not to schedule follow-up studies; and how to interpret and communicate findings to schools and policy makers. Using personal experiences from their field research to illustrate key concepts,...

Covers how to write good questions aimed at collecting information about objective facts and events, some alternative methods for attacking common measurement problems, how to evaluate the extent to which questions are consistently understood and administered, and how to evaluate the data resulting from a set of questions.

Students and researchers who want to improve the quality of their mail-survey data collection will find this book invaluable. The author considers such issues as: reducing sampling bias; questioning response errors; and obtaining good response rates from a mail surveys. The book also offers useful insights and tips on: problems to avoid in mail surveys; what type of rating scales to use; open-ended versus closed-ended questions; screening questions and skip instructions; question and response order effects; sampling strategies; and ways to reduce nonresponse errors - for example, by...

PLEASE UPDATE SAGE INDIA AND SAGE UK ADDRESSES ON IMPRINT PAGE.

'Throughout the book general points are given a concrete illustration by reference to specific examples of special education research. The breadth of reference is a strength of the text, with a bias towards work on deafness and hearing impairment, in which Mertens has a particular interest. Wherever such illustrations are offered, the book comes alive...there are few sources for a wide range of short accounts of examples of the practice of research in special education. This short book is a convenient and well-organized addition to them' - Division of Educational and Child Psychology...

Givers information on computer-based storage and retrieval systems. This title features expanded coverage of computer-based information, including a chapter on CD-ROM products and updated coverage of on-line information search services.