ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the basic operation elements of running a research or evaluation problem. It provides important context for understanding what research and evaluation is all about, how it relates to evidence-based practices, and how to get started with some necessary initial tasks such as posing a central project question and doing a literature review to gain understanding of the substantive context in which the project resides. Measurement of some social phenomena may or may not be a relatively difficult task—it all depends on whether there are relevant existing data that are available or not, or on how easy or difficult it is to measure a concept or a phenomenon, and so forth. One important point to get a handle on right away is that when we measure something in a particular way, it affects what kinds of subsequent analytic assessments are available.
