Practicing Research

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 FeaturesProvides 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.