Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Research

Drawing on the insights of a distinguished group of international scholars from a variety of disciplines, Soundbite Culture combines theory with case analysis to describe and account for the environment within which discourse has declined, and what has replaced it and why. The authors explore the implications of their premise by investigating various media, their methods, and their social, cultural and political implications. Topics include targeted direct mail campaigns, polling, infomercials, Internet identities, radio talk shows, and film depictions.

Through the use of compelling questions and examples, Dennis E Mithaug shows you how to implement his four-step strategy to construct explanations for uncertainties about how things work, how they ought to work, and what should be done about them. He begins the book with an explanation of the practical features of constructive theorizing and shows how it mirrors general problem solving, practical reasoning, and self-regulated learning. You will learn how to separate the facts, value and actions of a situation in order to clarify and understand their relationship as well as how a thinking...

Through examples and exercises, this handy student guide teaches methods for sampling, data gathering, developing questionnaires, reliability and validity, and quantitative and qualitative measurement. In addition, the book explains the use of quality improvement tools and techniques in measurement. It will be invaluable in any graduate statistics course, particularly for those in business administration and management.

The authors use the tools of philosophy and the insights from evaluation practice to cut through current confusion about values and the interplay of facts and values. Four views of facts and values in evaluation are analyzed: those rooted in a fact-value dichotomy and those of radical constructivists, postmodernists, and deliberative democrats. The arguments are tough, the prose concise, and the insights compelling.

Leading social research methodologists and evaluators address the issues of validity, research design and social experimentation in this first of two volumes inspired by the work of Donald Campbell and sponsored by the American Evaluation Association. Each chapter is designed to offer readers insight into such issues as validity applied to meta-analysis, subject selection problems in randomized experiments, time-series designs and quasi-experiments, and the logic of ruling out rival hypotheses. Anyone engaged in social research will find this book a thought-provoking and inspiring read for...