San Antonio College Library

How can you gauge public support for a cause or test the market for a product or service? What are the best methods for validating opinions for use in a paper or dissertation? A well-documented survey is the answer. But what if you don't have thousands of dollars to commission one? No problem. How to Conduct Your Own Survey gives you everything you need to do it yourself! Without any prior training, you can learn expert techniques for conducting accurate,...

"Very few performance improvement products and services deliver everything they promise. So how can you be sure you're getting your money's worth and selecting the right performance solution for your organization's needs? Fortunately, a great deal of research has been done on the various types of performance improvement programs, telling you exactly what works and what doesn't. Turning Research Into Results gathers into one essential book this important...

Interviews are ubiquitous in modern society, and they play a crucial role in social scientific research. But, as Charles Briggs convincingly argues in this book, received interviewing techniques rest on fundamental misapprehensions about the nature both of the interview as a communicative event, and of the nature of the data that it produces. Furthermore, interviewers rarely examine the compatibility of interviews as a means of acquiring information...

"In discipline after discipline, old models, methods, and theories of research have been supplanted or supplemented by new paradigms, strategies, and techniques based on a naturalistic study of people in their social and cultural environment. The Handbook of Qualitative Research is the first attempt to synthesize this vast world of activity. The handbook moves from the theoretical to the specific, examining the various paradigms for doing qualitative...

This work introduces students to the central ideas which surround the chaos/complexity theories. It discusses key concepts before using them as a way of investigating the nature of social research.

The Foundations of Social Research details the major epistemological stances and theoretical perspectives that colour and shape current social research: positivism; constructionism; interpretivism; critical enquiry, feminism; and postmodernism.

This useful book outlines four key strategies for interpreting qualitative data: ethnomethodology; semiotics; dramaturgy; and deconstruction. To demonstrate, the author applies the techniques of each method to a single data set, highlighting the differences in results.