ABSTRACT

Get accurate information on social work concepts—anytime, anyplace!

The Social Work Student's Research Handbook keeps the information you need on essential classroom concepts and principles right at your fingertips. Practical and easy to use, this comprehensive handbook provides instant access to the nuts and bolts of social work research. The handbook is a perfect resource to help students integrate research into projects, theses, and dissertations, and to help practitioners refresh, review, and organize their professional processes.

The Social Work Student's Research Handbook is a complement to the dense and heavy research books available that cover a lot of material—and have the pages to prove it! It helps you sort through the narrative, details, and examples to get straight to the heart of each issue when it counts. It provides the tools you need to get through the learning process and is an essential aid for reference use with professional literature; for selecting a problem for social work study; identifying a design type; developing or selecting an instrument; developing a sampling strategy; collecting and analyzing data; and organizing, writing, disseminating, and utilizing results.

The Social Work Student's Research Handbook includes concise, usable information on:

  • problem formulation
  • working from questions or hypothesis
  • assumptions
  • design options (exploratory, descriptive, experimental)
  • evaluations (practice, program)
  • data analysis (qualitative, quantitative)
  • and much more.
In addition, each chapter ends with a summary of major points to remember and a self-test exercise. The Social Work Student's Research Handbook is an invaluable resource for MSW students as they apply what they’ve learned in research courses toward original research projects. It’s equally handy for social work practitioners and research instructors.

chapter |2 pages

Preface

chapter |3 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|7 pages

Problem Formulation: What to Study

chapter 2|8 pages

Using the Literature

chapter 3|5 pages

Working from Questions or Hypotheses

chapter 4|7 pages

Variables

chapter 5|3 pages

Assumptions

chapter 6|4 pages

Design Options

chapter 7|4 pages

Exploratory Design

chapter 8|3 pages

Descriptive Design

chapter 9|5 pages

Descriptive Design

chapter 10|7 pages

Correlational Design

chapter 11|5 pages

Plausible Alternative Explanations

chapter 12|8 pages

Practice Evaluation

chapter 13|6 pages

Program Evaluation

chapter 14|7 pages

Working Toward Reliability and Validity

chapter 15|12 pages

Sampling

chapter 16|7 pages

Data Collection

chapter 17|6 pages

Data Analysis: An Overview

chapter 21|9 pages

Tests of Statistical Significance

chapter 22|3 pages

Wrapping It Up