Doing your own research / Eileen Kane and Mary O'Reilly-de Brún

Includes bibliographical references and index

The Book, the People, the Places -- Social Research: the Big Debate -- How Do We Know About the World? -- Is Social Science a Science? -- Where Does Theory Fit In? -- Getting Ready to Do Research -- Finding Your Research Idea -- Clarifying the Goals and Purpose of Your Research -- Choosing Your Perspective -- Do You Want to Describe Something? -- Etic Approach -- Developing a Rough Research Idea and Refining It -- Creating a Research Statement or Hypothesis -- Identifying the Sub-topics for Study -- Putting the Outline in Perspective -- Making Decisions About Sources of Information -- Making Decisions About Information-Gathering Techniques -- Emic Approach -- Do You Want to Explain or Predict Something? -- Cause and Effect Studies -- Experimental Designs -- Causation -- Choosing Your Experimental Design -- Analytical Survey Designs -- Who Will be in Your Study? -- Probability Sampling -- Non-probability Sampling -- Sample Size -- Sampling and Non-sampling Errors -- Techniques and Strategies -- Choosing your techniques and strategies -- Your Research Strategy -- Your Research Techniques -- Style -- Working With 'Insiders' and Learning From Their Knowledge -- Ethics -- Getting Help From the Library and the Internet -- The Library -- The Internet -- Giving a Survey -- Surveys and Questionnaires -- Mini Surveys -- Postal Surveys and Drop-off Surveys -- Telephone Surveys -- Special Considerations for Non-Western Cultural Groups -- Looking Back at Our Interview -- Using Measures, Scales, and Indices -- Using Scales and Indices