Practitioners in need of timely results for program and policy planning—and students looking forrealistic research projects—will find solutions in Rapid Qualitative Inquiry (RQI), a team-based,applied research method designed to quickly develop an insider’s perspective on and preliminaryunderstanding of complicated “on-the-ground” situations.In this accessible field guide to RQI, James Beebe provides an introduction to research thatsubstitutes teamwork f...

A newer edition of this book is available at the following address: https://www.bloomsbury.com/rapid-qualitative-inquiry-9780759123212/RapidAssessment Process (RAP) has gone under many names but invariably uses the techniques of fieldwork and ethnography in a telescoped manner to provide solid, field-based research findings for use by policymakers and program planners. It uses an emic perspective, a team of researchers, triangulation of research findings, and iterative process to p...

"Impact beautifully distills the insights and deep wisdom of one of the world's great social innovators. Etmanski's book is far more than a practical guide: it's an invitation to re-imagine possibilities for our lives and for the world we create."- David Bornstein, author "How To Change The World"From the Introduction:Do you want to change the world but feel frustrated by the limited impact you and others have had? Do you feel that despite your best efforts, and indee...

A collection of chapters on key theories employed in research into information behaviour, i.e., how people interact with information. The chapters are written by known researchers who have employed the theories in their work.There are eight chapters, covering activity theory, critical theory, personal construct theory, personality theory, practice theory, social cognitive theory, social phenomenology and theoretical approaches in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Scientific monograph »Integration of online research« methods deals withcurrently two highly debated topics in social science research: thecombination of qualitative and quantitative methods and online researchmethods. It introduces an innovative approach in combining data collectionresearch methods in the context of information communicationtechnologies.The monograph is currently one of 35 in the world, dealingwith combining qualitative and ...

This reader-friendly textbook is the first work of its kind to provide a unified Introduction to Computational Social Science (CSS). Four distinct methodological approaches are examined in detail, namely automated social information extraction, social network analysis, social complexity theory and social simulation modeling. The coverage of these approaches is supported by a discussion of the historical context, as well as by a list of texts for further reading. Features: highligh...

This unique addition to the Success in Research series addresses the importance of understanding and achieving impact for the purposes of gaining research funding and reporting achieved impact for the Research Excellence Framework (REF).The book includes contributions from researchers and researcher developers who feel that impact is ill-defined and poorly understood despite its prevalence in policy documents, websites and institutional activities. This succinct and cohesive text d...

This accessible text on social research methodology teaches students of sociology and related disciplines how standard methods can be adapted toward critical ends. The second edition has been updated throughout to incorporate the latest critical scholarship, enhanced discussion of qualitative methods, new material on global issues, sex/sexuality/gender, new discussion of intersectionality, how social media can shape research, and more.Author Joey Sprague describes and evaluates a w...

Multidimensional Item Response Theory is the first book to give thorough coverage to this emerging area of psychometrics. The book describes the commonly used multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) models and the important methods needed for their practical application. These methods include ways to determine the number of dimensions required to adequately model data, procedures for estimating model parameters, ways to define the space for a MIRT model, and procedures for tr...

Social research practitioners and others working in the public and voluntary sectors, in academia and consultancy are increasingly under pressure to provide policy-related evidence with limited resources and rising expectations. Demystifying evaluation is an accessible introductory guide setting the foundations for tackling those challenges, explaining the options open to evaluators, their merits and uses, and how to make appropriate choices of research methods.Drawing on his exper...

The volume presents, in a synergistic manner, significant theoretical and practical contributions in the area of social media reputation and authorship measurement, visualization, and modeling. The book justifies and proposes contributions to a future agenda for understanding the requirements for making social media authorship more transparent. Building on work presented in a previous volume of this series, Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets, this book ...

No less than a revolutionary transformation of the research enterprise is underway. This transformation extends beyond the natural sciences, where 'e-research' has become the modus operandi, and is penetrating the social sciences and humanities, sometimes with differences in accent and label. Many suggest that the very essence of scholarship in these areas is changing. The everyday procedures and practices of traditional forms of scholarship are affected by these and other feature...