Practicing Research
Discovering Evidence That Matters
- Arlene Fink - UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
Practicing Research: Discovering Evidence That Matters provides students, practitioners, and researchers with guidance on best practices. The book's eight chapters correspond to the skills that research consumers need to discover evidence that matters. Author Arlene Fink pays special attention to facilitating student learning by offeringing over a hundred examples, exercises, tables, figures, and checklists, as well as an extensive glossary. All the examples are taken from existing research and programs and grounded in the practitioner's reality.
Key Features
- Provides methods for determining the validity of evidence and how to justify an acceptable level of "proof" based on science, experience, and values
- Offers practical frameworks to guide the research process and take the student from needs assessment to program implementation and evaluation through to implementation of results
- Shows how to engage diverse stakeholders (communities, teachers) in the research process
- Accompanied by a companion Web site at www.sagepub.com/finkstudy that consists of Web exercises for students for each chapter
Intended Audience
This text is intended to be the core text or one of the primary texts for applied research courses at the graduate level in Education, Social Work, Public Administration and Policy, Evaluation, Health, Nursing, and Criminal Justice. Readers should have a passing familiarity with the idea of research, but no special research expertise is necessary.
"Fink excels in [her] introduction to research design and includes a useful discussion on threats to internal and external validity, [...] a particular strength of the work."
The course content has changed. However, sections of this book are useful to our students doing capstone projects
An excellent text providing the researcher with vital information to establish how to undertake good research with meaning.
Excellent book for evidence based research needed by DNP students, who are expected to conduct evidenced based projects.
Fink's excellent clarity of writing and well-structured text makes her book a superb supplement to a text that is more directly about programme evaluation.
Adequatley shows students how to explicate evidence to incorporate into research.
It was clearly written for students in a beginning research course, was skill based in terms of searching and evaluating the literature, and was offered at a reasonable cost.
While this text probably could work for my research methods in health course, it focuses primarily on
"evidence based medicine." The cost is reasonable.
Sage College Publishing
