HON 499 Professor Moon's Library Instruction (Dr. Duncan): Home

This text provides a concrete roadmap for the design and implimentation of experiments using human participants. It covers both conceptual and practical issues that are critical to experimental methods and the organization of the book follows the standard process in experiment-based research. Both students and instructors will find this book accessible and easy to use. The detailed guidance on each step of an experiment is particularly useful for people with little or no previous training in research methodology. Further, the example studies will serve as effective ′recipes′ to help students organize their experimental studies. Features: - shows students how to prepare to run experiments covering important topics such as how to recruit participants, maintainance of apparatus, and what to measure from the experiment - a separate chapter on ethics examines ethical considerations necessary for running experiments with human participants - a separate chapter covers essential information on IRBs (Institutional Review Boards) - provides example studies with a brief synopsis of procedural steps. so that students can learn detailed procedures for preparing and running an experiment.

Survey Research can be used as an independent guide or as a workbook to accompany Keith F Punch′s bestselling Introduction to Social Research (SAGE, 1998). It represents a short, practical `how-to′ book on a central methodology technique aimed at the beginning researcher. The focus of this book is on small-scale quantitative surveys studying the relationships between variables. After showing the central place of the quantitative survey in social science research methodology, it then takes a simple model of the survey, describes its elements and gives a set of steps and guidelines for implementing each element. The book then shows how the simple model of the quantitative survey generalizes easily to more complex models. It includes a detailed example of both simple and complex models, which readers should find very helpful. It is directed primarily at beginning researchers - upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in any area of social science, who often have to do small scale surveys in projects and dissertations. Beyond this, it will be of interest to anybody interested in learning about survey research. It is written in non-technical language, aiming to be as accessible as possible to a wide audience.