The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project

The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project gives students the knowledge and skills they need to get from ′clueless′ to ′completed′. This highly readable text guides the reader through each stage of their research project, from getting started to writing up, with each chapter clearly explaining a step along the way.

Based on the author′s hugely popular The Essential Guide to Doing Research, this new book retains the warmth, wit and grounded nature of the first, while providing tools to help students through the ins and outs of their own projects, and addressing the key questions students need to tackle, such as:

• What is this thing called research and why do it?
• How can I assure that my research project has integrity?
• How to I develop a researchable question?
• How do I construct a winning proposal?
• What exactly is expected in a literature review?
• What options are there in qualitative, quantitative, mixed and more purposive methodological designs?
• Is it best to work with a sample, key informants, or a case?
• What data collection options are there and how do I choose?
• How should I work with my quantitative data?
• What should I do with my qualitative data?
• How in the world will I capture this on paper?

This book is full of down-to-earth advice, illuminating figures, and diagrams and engaging real life examples. With this book as your personal mentor, a successfully completed research project is well within reach.

Zina O’Leary is an internationally recognized leader in research methodologies and has a keen interest in the application of research to evidence-based decision-making. Zina is an Adjunct Professor at the Joseph R. Biden Jr, School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware as well as a Senior ­Fellow at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government where she coordinates research and project units for their Executive Masters and Executive Education Programmes. Zina also has an extensive history as a consultant to both government and the private sector and was the research coordinator for the Centre for Environmental Health Development at the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre. She is the author of Researching Real World Problems, The Social Science Jargon Buster, Workplace Research and three books in Sage’s Little Quick Fix Series: Research Questions; Research Proposals; and Presenting Your Research.